Recap: March 5, 2019 Meetup

Thank you to our sponsors for making tonight’s meetup possible. And congrats to Jared, Eric, and Dave, winners of Manning Publications’ Elixir In Action, The Little Elixir and OTP Guidebook, and Phoenix In Action. Remember you can always use our group’s discount code—ug367—on manning.com for 36% off their books on Elixir and other topics.

Tonight’s event was an Elixir Open Mic Night. Eric started things off, having just returned from Lonestar Elixir Conf (see his talk here). Eric recently introduced some big changes to his Grapevine game network, most notably a web client where you can play games from across the network without leaving your browser! Eric and his company SmartLogic have also been producing content, including a fantastic Elixir podcast (featuring some familiar Indy Elixir faces) and an Elixir coding live stream (recordings here).

Jared shared a new library he found, wormhole, that runs a function, traps any errors, and returns a status—handy when you don’t want to risk a process dying and losing its state while processing unknown data.

Finally, we wrapped up with an Exercism.io exercise appropriately titled “Meetup” about calculating meetup dates given a schedule like “second Monday” or “Wednesteenth” (the only Wednesday ending in “-teenth”). See our solution here. It was fun to workshop, even if it could have been simpler if we’d used the recently-added Calendar module. This bit was my favorite:

defp ok!({:ok, value}), do: value

We wanted to call it 🆗, but were surprised (given Elixir’s excellent Unicode support) that emoji in function names won’t compile. 🤷‍♂️

Our next event will be on Tuesday, May 7, 2019 We’re always looking for speakers—please reach out if you’re interested!