Viewing profile — nathan_long

On my 15-inch MacBook, I have a full-screen terminal running tmux, split down the middle with Vim in the left pane and a shell in the right pane. At the smallest font size I can st…

A discussion of how Erlang processes help us build scalable and reliable systems in Elixir. This may not be news to developers, but might be useful for broader company discussions.…

This is really murky to me. As a professional, I keep notes as I learn things which may or may not relate to my current employment. The notes are my property and part of my knowled…

> I work at a large tech company on a young team (average age is late twenties). In my experience many don't view working from home regularly as a benefit. I understand that must c…

So you're considering Candidate A, who lives in SF, and B, who lives in a small town. You decide that B has to compete with A on talent, but A doesn't have to compete with B on pri…

It cuts both ways, right? Companies: "I don't have to pay you $big_city rates because you live in $small_town and nobody there will offer you $big_city rates." Candidates: "I don't…

> Hiring is more difficult. It's not that you can't find applicants, but the people capable of performing without direct supervision is (mostly) a subset of those capable of perfor…

Yep. But I'm not lugging a crock pot on a plane. :)

> There can be a fair amount of lag time over messenger and this occasionally blocks the completion of work. Agreed. But the reverse is also true: it's harder for people to interru…

It's impossible to have a company potluck.

> That's the same risk you have with any open source project. Yes and no. The larger the number of dependencies you have, and the larger number of maintainers that are behind them,…

Lumen may be the answer to this in the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMgTIlgYB-U&list=PLqj39LCvnO...

The common retort from SPA devs is "what about offline?" Since LiveView keeps state on the server, it doesn't really work offline. However, 1) you can add custom JS using LiveView'…

> The only modern web problem that Elixir isn't ideally suited for is heavy number crunching. I would caveat that in a couple of ways. First, suppose you have a web app where some …

The answer is applicable. LiveView is implemented using Phoenix Channels.

You can see some other examples of LiveView apps at https://phoenixphrenzy.com/results

Chris McCord has given some talks and explained this - eg see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xJzHq8ru0M at about 22 minutes in

I like to say that the BEAM's preemptive scheduling provides non-blocking IO AND non-blocking computation. To expand on your workload description: things like waiting for a databas…

Another consideration: Phoenix PubSub makes it simple and performant to add more servers. So if one (say) chat app server can provide acceptable performance for N users, you can se…

Imagine this: you set your browser to download only the first N bytes of each image, showing you a decent preview. If you want more detail on a particular image, you tap it, and th…

Are you being serious? If a bank "locked" its vault by tying the door closed with yarn, would you say "at least they locked it"?

This was a contest to show off what Elixir's Phoenix LiveView can do. More about the underlying tech at https://dockyard.com/blog/2018/12/12/phoenix-liveview-intera...

> Stallman was arguing that from Minsky's point of view, he probably had no reason to suspect that he was not dealing with a consenting girl. "Consenting girl" is a contradiction. …