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Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

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Re: Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

#32

Sorry for asking a dumb question, but how is this different from using Jupyter to write your interactive documentation/runbooks and interactive tests?

> how is this different from using Jupyter

It requires you to run a far less common tech stack and limits your hiring to a vanishingly small subset of developers.

Paradoxically, that may be a good thing.

Re: Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

#33

One simple thing I need thats stopping me from jumping into Livebook fully: Salesforce API integration. Right now, I can't manage to make the auth work there (since oAuth needs some http redirect dance). Connecting to some proper SQL database is a breeze, but if I cannot access some silo'ed data that is absilute critical, its not that useful after all :-/

Please open up a discussion on Livebook repo? We would love to understand more what is missing here. :)

Re: Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

#34

Sorry for asking a dumb question, but how is this different from using Jupyter to write your interactive documentation/runbooks and interactive tests?

> how is this different from using Jupyter It requires you to run a far less common tech stack and limits your hiring to a vanishingly small subset of developers. Paradoxically, that may be a good thing.

Love it! yes, it might be better. We have found paying above market average and being tighter on interviews has a similar outcome.

Re: Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

#35

While I'm glad the idea of tying documentation to tests is catching on, I think markdown documentation -> create tests is the wrong way around. I built this tool to let people generate evergreen markdown documentation from annotated type-safe YAML integration tests: https://github.com/hitchdev/hitchstory

This is incredible work.

To anyone curious, I highly recommend:

- https://hitchdev.com/hitchstory/approach/

- https://hitchdev.com/hitchstory/why-not/

From the overall RDD/BDD type home page:

- https://hitchdev.com/hitchstory/

The entire product site is a thing of richly informative beauty.

---

My only question was whether the generated 'docs' snippets would add value over just reading the story in your DASL. Any markdown site generator (such as the chosen Material for MKDocs) can just embed the ```yaml anyway. But then I realized what was generating e.g. …

- https://hitchdev.com/hitchstory/using/engine/rewrite-story/

… and how superior that is to typical docs, especially typical docstring or swagger factories.

Re: Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

#36

To ensure you do not miss this: LiveBook comes with a Vega Lite integration ( https://livebook.dev/integrations -> https://livebook.dev/integrations/vega-lite/ ), which means you get access to a lot of visualisations out of the box, should you need that ( https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/ ). In the same "standing on giant's shoulders" stance, you can use Explorer (see example LiveBook at https://github.com/elixir-exp…

The vega-lite wrapper is very slim too, basically just converts your slithery_snake keys into humpyCamels and corrals between different data sources, so if the docs on the elixir page seem sparse its because most of the "how do I build a graph like x" is just on the vega docs. You can easily dump it to json to share too, etc.

Good note :-) The wrapper can by the way be used outside of LiveBook (e.g. https://twitter.com/thibaut_barrere/status/16885335909659033...) to provide charting in an Elixir app.

Re: Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

#37

To ensure you do not miss this: LiveBook comes with a Vega Lite integration ( https://livebook.dev/integrations -> https://livebook.dev/integrations/vega-lite/ ), which means you get access to a lot of visualisations out of the box, should you need that ( https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/ ). In the same "standing on giant's shoulders" stance, you can use Explorer (see example LiveBook at https://github.com/elixir-exp…

The vega-lite wrapper is very slim too, basically just converts your slithery_snake keys into humpyCamels and corrals between different data sources, so if the docs on the elixir page seem sparse its because most of the "how do I build a graph like x" is just on the vega docs. You can easily dump it to json to share too, etc.

It's a shame because elixir documentation is gorgeous

Re: Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how is this different from using Jupyter It requires you to run a far less common tech stack and limits your hiring to a vanishingly small subset of developers. Paradoxically, that may be a good thing.

Love it! yes, it might be better. We have found paying above market average and being tighter on interviews has a similar outcome.

Elixir market is already more high paying than python.

Re: Elixir Livebook is a secret weapon for documentation

#40
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To do so much with it you need to know Elixir or Erlang ;)

Fwiw, I’ve been using Elixir professionally for 5 or so years and even created a few open source libraries. Never once had to touch Erlang.

Or, not and. Livebook just added Erlang cells.
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