Easy Concurrency Locking in Erlang/Elixir

Out of the box, Elixir and Erlang offer a very powerful tool for serializing access to a resource via the GenServer included in OTP and surfaced in the Elixir standard library. As a GenServer processes messages it receives both in order and synchronously, it becomes a great tool…

Simulating Distributed Clusters for Elixir Unit Tests

During the recent addition of distribution to Cachex, I realised that testing distributed behaviour is quite annoying. Although there's a tonne of useful inside the OTP standard library, it's not particularly obvious if you don't know what you're looking for. Most projects (such…

Cachex v3.1 and the Return of Distributed Caches

If you work with Elixir on web services, you may have come across a library I work on named Cachex. Although the name makes it somewhat obvious, this is a library based on caching expensive data in memory. It works inside your application layers using the Erlang Term Storage (ETS…

Automatic Unsafe Function Generation in Elixir

Elixir developers typically conform to the standard of returning Tuple structures from functions which can either succeed or fail in order to effectively signal their status to the caller. Whilst this encourages the caller to directly handle the various cases which can arise, som…

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 Elixir,…

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 lit…

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. T…

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 GitHu…

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 the la…