Yesterday was my last day at Geolonia. I had been working at Geolonia since the beginning of 2021, making it just over 3 years. During my time there, I worked on many interesting projects, but I felt that it was time to make a change.
In these 3 years, a lot has changed. The world has seen the rise of LLM-based AI solutions appear and grow rapidly. There are many questions about its effectiveness and ethics, but it’s too late for that now. It’s time to really think about how AI technologies can be used to advance society.
In the beginning of 2015, I wrote a blog post about how my then-current programming language of choice (Ruby) was showing itself to not be as future-proof as I would have liked it to be.
A lot has changed since then, but a lot has remained the same.
First: I have started a few open-source Elixir projects:
Exfile -- a file upload handling, persistence, and processing library. Extracted from an image upload service I’m working on (also in Elixir).
The initial push to get me in to Elixir was indeed its performance, but that’s not what kept me. At the same time, I also tried learning Go and more recently, Rust has caught my attention.
In my 5-minute lightning talk, I talked about the basics of using Exfile. Exfile is a file upload persistence and processing library for Elixir with integrations for Ecto and Phoenix.
I’m a big Let’s Encrypt fan. They provide free SSL certificates for your web servers so you can protect the traffic from prying eyes. In fact, the connection between your web browser and my blog server is made private thanks to Let’s Encrypt.
Using Let’s Encrypt requires some setup and automation on your part if you want to use it in the AWS cloud, but AWS recently launched something called the AWS Certificate Manager or “ACM”. ACM takes care of issuing, renewing, and provisioning certificates for you – which is great because uploading SSL certificates to CloudFront and Elastic Load Balancers is not the most fun thing to do. I would pay for this, but Amazon has decided to give it to everyone for free. :-)
There’s a guide to writing browser acceptance tests for Phoenix. Acceptance tests are nice, but sometimes you want to have unit tests. This is very easy to do with your Elixir code, but what about your JavaScript code that lives inside your Phoenix application?
I couldn’t find a good guide on this, so I’ll go over what I have set up for one of my latest Phoenix projects.
Setup
First, install mocha if you haven’t already. I’ll be using mocha, but you can use whatever test runner you want to. You’ll also need babel-register -- this will allow you to use Babel while the tests are being run in Node.
In Ruby, there is a very handy class called StringIO. Basically, it allows you to treat a string like you would an IO object, such as an open file, etc. Very useful for in-memory “files” that you may not want to write to a temporary file.
In Elixir, there is a module called StringIO in the standard library. At first glance, these seem pretty similar:
I wrote a post about upgrading from 9.3 to 9.4 in the past, and many people found it useful, so I decided to update it a bit for the 9.4 to 9.5 upgrade.
bundle install --without development:test
...
...
Bundle complete! XX Gemfile dependencies, XX gems now installed.
Gems in the groups development and test were not installed.
Now,
bundle install
...
...
Bundle complete! XX Gemfile dependencies, XX gems now installed.
Gems in the groups development and test were not installed.
Basically – you run bundle install --without <group> once, and that’s saved in .bundle/config. So next time you run bundle install without any arguments, it won’t install gems in the groups you specify.
