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Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

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Re: Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

#11
I'll admit that I was initially skeptical about Elixir for anything ML related when I first picked up the pragprog book on Elixir and Genetic Algorithms.

Since that time, things have moved quite a bit. Between the Erlang VM JIT, then Nx, and now this, it's starting to look hopeful!

I'm looking forward to digging into this.

Re: Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

#12
post #8

Is it just me or is Elixir being talked/written about more in the past couple of months?

There were 300 elixir stories in 2020, an average of roughly .8 per day. In 2021 there have been 89 elixir stories for 108 days, so about the same. (Source: hnsearch)

Re: Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

#13
post #8

Is it just me or is Elixir being talked/written about more in the past couple of months?

It is growing and having good adoption. Not a huge language but it also has a fair share of novel features (being built on Erlang) that aren't commonly seen with other langs. So I think it might have a disproportionate visibility compared to size. Lots of work happening in the community, lots of ambitious ideas and releases.

Re: Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

#15

So this is like Jupyter notebooks for Elixir?

With google docs style collaborative editing, can connect to an existing cluster to run code in it. You can run one instance of the Livebook application and have different livebook docs run for different Elixir projects you happen to be working on.

Not sure what parts are in Jupyter but I've heard collab editing isn't.

Pretty hype about trying this for some living docs and teaching. Will see if I can do anything neat with it. Already tried it some.

Re: Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

#16
post #4

"connect to an existing node" is going to be amazing. I imagine two interesting uses for this. 1. producing reports. Connect a livebook session to your system in prod, run a livebook (which pulls data from DB eg), then get back a report. User engagement, cloud resources consumed, p90s, or an incident report... 2. manual database intervention. Suppose you need to manually make a batch of changes to the DB. It would be…

Be careful, websockets are tricky to secure and get right. It's easy to do something like forget to check the origin and now you've opened up a whole class of cross-site websocket scripting attacks. I love the idea of easy access and nice UI to prod machines, but put it behind a secure proxy or VPN layer and not facing the public internet.

Re: Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

#17
Awesome work! Towards the end, José hits on a couple points that Jupyter does not do well:

  - Minute 25: Saved notebook is readable (markdown)
  - Minute 23: Live collaborate on a single notebook
  - Minute 22: Visual indication that cell is stale after an upstream cell changes

Re: Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

#18
post #8

Is it just me or is Elixir being talked/written about more in the past couple of months?

A bunch of startups including my own bet big on elixir 2 years ago and are starting to launch and gain prominence. the first wave of early adopters are coming out with battle stories to share and the conclusion is that elixir is the real deal.

Re: Livebook: A collaborative and interactive code notebook for Elixir

#19
post #4

"connect to an existing node" is going to be amazing. I imagine two interesting uses for this. 1. producing reports. Connect a livebook session to your system in prod, run a livebook (which pulls data from DB eg), then get back a report. User engagement, cloud resources consumed, p90s, or an incident report... 2. manual database intervention. Suppose you need to manually make a batch of changes to the DB. It would be…

Be careful, websockets are tricky to secure and get right. It's easy to do something like forget to check the origin and now you've opened up a whole class of cross-site websocket scripting attacks. I love the idea of easy access and nice UI to prod machines, but put it behind a secure proxy or VPN layer and not facing the public internet.

That's very reasonable.
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