A Year with Cachex in Production

A little over a year ago I began working on what would become my first real project in Elixir. Without going into too much detail, it was a re-imagination of a legacy system designed to handle many incoming data streams quickly and reliably. It seemed like a good fit for…

Introducing Vessel: A Bridge Between Elixir and Hadoop

Disclaimer: I should point out that I wrote this project for those who are already working with Elixir and have need of integrating their existing codebases with Hadoop. I'm going to try assume limited knowledge of Hadoop/Elixir within this post - but I apologise if it goes a little…

Stash: a user-friendly wrapper for ETS/DTS caching in Elixir

Erlang (and by extension, Elixir) comes with a sweet little memory storage library called ETS (Erlang Term Storage). This provides an awesome way to store a whole bunch of values in memory, without having to write your own implementation, or pull in large third-party libraries. The issue with ETS is…

Writing SipHash: my introduction to NIFs in Elixir

After recently discovering SipHash when searching for a solid algorithm to use in another project, I decided to take a shot at writing an implementation in Elixir as an exercise (having only started picking up Elixir in the last few weeks or so). The project is available on GitHub and…

Introducing Oryx; a convient scaffolding library for Node.js and Express

Say hello to Oryx. Oryx is a project I have been working on for a little over a month now, born from another project I'm currently working on (but haven't yet released). It's designed to be a fairly straightforward way to set up an Express app to use models and…

Java 8 Custom Collectors: Jackson ArrayNode

Streams are one of the niceties provided in JDK 8 and they provide extreme flexibility to the user. They make it extremely easy to transform Collections in some way, either serially or in parallel. One of the most awesome things about Streams is that they're extremely extensible. The example we're…

Using MongoDB with Elixir, Phoenix and Ecto

This is as much for my reference as anyone else's, so I hope everything is clear enough for newcomers. Update: Refer here for an example project following the method below. Due to having gotten a little bored with Node.js in recent times, and also a lack of engagement with…

Dot Notes: a simple module for parsing dot notation

Recently I have somehow found myself in need of using JavaScript dot notation to represent values a bit too often to bother constantly rewriting the code for it. Turns out, there's no real (and nice) way to do this in the way that I wanted. Perhaps I'm conforming to some…

Safely Creating Custom Handlebars Helpers For Ghost Blogs

I'm fairly new to Handlebars, the templating system that the blogging system Ghost uses, but my initial impressions are that it's a pretty sweet tool to use. However, it's somewhat limited when you're developing a Ghost blog, due to the fact that Ghost only implements certain definitions. Odds are that…

Neek - A faster way to remove duplicates in files

You may be aware of the *nix tool uniq, used to filter duplicate values from within files. Uniq is a simple way to remove duplicated lines within a file via a simple command. The downside to uniq is that it requires the input to be sorted, which can be a…