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Hello everyone! It's great to be here. I've always wanted to come to Thailand.
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To Bangkok, to eat as much as humanly possible, and I've started doing that.
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It's been really wonderful. I started with Ruby back in 2008, so it's been over a decade that I've been writing Rails apps and doing Ruby.
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I came from a world that wasn't great, specifically working on Flash banner ads.
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When you're building something that everyone loves on the internet, it gives you a warm feeling inside.
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That's part of where I started with ActionScript 3, which is very similar to Java.
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I got to a point where I thought, my life shouldn't be this painful. Why do I hate working?
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I looked for other technologies, and what I found were these two options.
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It was very hard to decide which of the two things that looked good I should pick.
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So, I asked a woman named Amy Hoy, who does a lot of marketing stuff and had her own SaaS for time tracking.
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At the time, I think it was called Freckle. I asked her what I should pick, and she said, 'Ruby! It's easy, just go with Ruby.'
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I like to give important decisions in my life to other people, so I was like, 'Okay, I'll pick Ruby.'
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I went with it, and it was really the first programming language, the first stack, that made me feel good.
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I enjoyed doing side projects, and I even liked working on some of the boring stuff.
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I didn't think it was possible, but it was, and I felt that feeling for about 11 years.
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I've used a lot of tools in between; I did Swift for a year, Go partially, and Python for a year not too long ago.
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All of it really just felt like tools to me. It's good not to get super emotionally attached to your tools.
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However, Elixir and Phoenix are the first stack I've used that again gave me that joy from my work day-to-day.
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With side projects, I've been able to create in a new way which feels refreshing.
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The functional nature and how everything is put together forces you, with constraints, to think about your problems differently.
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And the way I think about them differently is in a very positive way.
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I don't know how long I've been doing Elixir development, probably off and on for about six years.
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But definitely in the last two years, for any new projects I create, I start with 'mix phx.new' instead of 'rails new'.
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So, thank you for the joy you brought me for 11, 12, or 10 years; I don't know how long it’s been.
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I've spent enough time with Ruby that I'm comfortable enough to move on to a different stack.
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I don't want you to think this is going to be any kind of Ruby-bashing talk at all.
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I still appreciate Ruby, and I still use it sometimes.
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I actually just wrote my first Elixir script the other day, which was one of the last holdouts I had from Ruby.
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If I needed to do something quickly on the shell, I would use Ruby.
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I'm almost completely done using Ruby, but I love the community and everything it has brought me over the years.
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All I have to say is, there are other options out there that you might want to explore to solve different problems.
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Here are ten reasons why I generally choose Phoenix before I would choose any other stack at this point.
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Reason one is that everything is designed to be parallel.
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There’s Moore’s law, and computers aren't really going to get faster anymore.
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The megahertz aren't going to increase, but we're going to have 10 billion cores in our computers.
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So everything needs to go parallel, and it's essential to think in a parallel way.
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It's an exaggeration, but it's necessary to have technologies that prioritize parallelism.
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For example, Go has channels, while Elixir has its processes.
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Everything you use in Elixir is within a process. Your shell runs in a process, your repo runs in a process.
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All of the components in Phoenix are running in processes.
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When you start working in a parallel environment, it helps overcome the challenges of using threads or forking out processes.
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You can create millions of processes if you want, and they take up very little memory to start.
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They own their memory space, and errors are encapsulated within them.
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If one crashes, it's just that process that crashes, not the whole system.
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Unless, of course, you are using a supervision tree, which is a nice feature I'm not discussing today.
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If you want to, feel free to come up to me later in the conference and ask me any Phoenix or Elixir questions.
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You can start a simple process using spawn, which returns an address to that process.
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The address is essentially where you send messages. All of these processors are started around you, and you get addresses to them.
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You can also name them after a module to give it a permanent name.
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Then you can send messages to it using its permanent name, or keep track of these PIDs.
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Usually, in a process, you'll have a loop that continuously pulls messages off a mailbox.
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Think of a PID like a mail address; when you send it a message, it goes into a mailbox, essentially a queue.
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You can pull them off synchronously.
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In a real production application, you spawn higher-level abstractions to manage processes.
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You can start them in your application, using a supervisor tree, where one process looks after child processes.
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If something breaks, the supervisor knows whether to restart it or alert you.
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You can also use something called a task, which is another abstraction on top of processes.
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Why am I discussing processes in the context of Phoenix?
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One issue I've had with Rails, for example, is starting long-running processes or doing polling jobs.
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I often end up starting polling jobs to retrieve information from a service several times a minute.
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Pub/Sub works very well in the Elixir world.
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So, if you need to fire and forget some message, you can send it to a process.
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It can be processed outside of your normal synchronous application workflow.
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For example, if you're sending off analytics that doesn't need to be perfect, you can fire them off to a process.
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Sending emails and similar tasks are great for this.
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You end up with an ecosystem of processes communicating with each other.
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One runs here, another runs there, and the architecture in my mind makes more sense.
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It feels like many little microservices that simplify communication.
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Reason two is that Phoenix is incredibly fast right out of the box.
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It's very quick, not quite Go speed, but close.
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Many of my requests come in nanoseconds rather than milliseconds without any optimization.
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I often run it on a Heroku dyno, so not a hefty box, and it feels very responsive.
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For example, I've worked on a sports meditation app with a React Native frontend and a Phoenix backend.
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It was featured multiple times on the App Store, and there was no blip in our CPU or memory usage.
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The throughput was steady, even during huge traffic increases.
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Reason three is that the testing story is excellent.
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Out of the box, you get 'mix test,' which looks in your test directory and runs any files named appropriately.
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There's tooling that allows you to use describe blocks like with RSpec.
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Everything just works! Because it’s functional, it's often easier to reason about your testing workflow.
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I have a productivity tip: if there's something you're procrastinating on, move it closer to you.
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If you're learning an instrument or trying to write more, keep your guitar or writing tools close to eliminate friction.
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There's a lot of friction with testing; I don't want to write tests because setting up the testing environment takes too long.
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There is essentially one way to do it in Phoenix, and it works really well.
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You can write tests incredibly quickly, including tests for web requests that are provided out of the box.
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This makes testing efficient and fast, another reason people might neglect testing.
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Running the entire test suite can take a long time, but the application I'm currently working on has a 30-40 minute test runtime.
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This is a large Phoenix app, and it's manageable, so you reach a point where performance matters.
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Now let's talk about creating some tests.
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This is a simple example; if you create documentation, you can use it in structure.
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With this example, if you have an IEx command in your documentation, you can write tests around it.
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This structure allows you to verify that your documentation accurately represents the expected outcome.
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Coverage tools come with the testing framework. You use 'mix,' the primary tool for generating and running tasks.
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Running tests with a flag also gives you coverage results.
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You receive an HTML report that helps you visualize where you're covered and where you're not.
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So, reason four is that the Phoenix dashboard is added by default.
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It provides useful metrics and real-time graphs. For example, you'll see RAM usage information.
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There’s a thing called an atom in Elixir, which is similar to a symbol, and it tracks your memory usage.
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Excessively created atoms can crash the Erlang VM if all memory is consumed.
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You can add other metrics easily, and it’s backed by a library called Telemetry.
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Telemetry is written in Erlang and is designed to work seamlessly with Elixir.
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It’s usable similarly to the instrumentation used in Rails.
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You can see your versioning, memory setup, and other metrics, including request logs.
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You can push it onto production if you want, using your existing authentication.
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This is all available for free and easily extendable.
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Reason five is the conversation around Phoenix and being more Rails-like.
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I've talked about this at Elixir conferences; some think it should be more Rails-like to attract more people.
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Jay was saying it should be less so to facilitate a more flexible system.
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With Phoenix, you separate concerns into different areas rather than merging everything into one.
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You have a DWC web folder containing controllers, live views, channels, and templates.
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Your domain logic goes into the app's flat namespace, where you can interact with databases, and much more.
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It's a divergent approach from the Rails axiom: 'Rails is not your application,' advocating for clean architectural separation.
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Reason six is that you get to keep your Rails-like generators.
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HTML generation, JSON templates, model-like migrations, and channels for live views are all supported.
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You can easily create your own generators using mix tasks.
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Reason seven is that authentication is shipped with Phoenix.
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There is a dependency called Phoenix Gen Auth.
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Jose had experienced some dissatisfaction with Devise's inflexibility, which lacked adaptability.
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He opted to work with generators instead of a library, making it easier to manage upgrades.
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With its built-in authentication, you gain access to all relevant files allowing for easier implementation.
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Reason eight discusses channels, which manage WebSockets in Phoenix effectively.
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It's straightforward to set up and is based on core utilities in Elixir and Erlang.
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You just create a socket and send tokens if necessary, which get pushed into the channel.
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When you join, the channel requires you to implement a join function; events through the WebSocket go through handle functions.
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You may see error messages when working with this interface, communicating through processes running continuously.
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As you progress, you'll naturally dive deeper into how these Elixir patterns operate.
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These channels have clients in various programming languages; I've used the Swift and JavaScript clients.
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You can easily use Phoenix as your WebSocket API and integrate it with your existing applications.
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Live view is groundbreaking, allowing you to render HTML and handle requests on the client side without much JavaScript.
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You can increase interactivity, creating responsive interfaces without the overhead of a traditional framework.
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The basic Javascript setup requires you to import a live socket, a very intuitive and developer-friendly process.
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If you need JS interactivity, hooks allow seamless integration with your applications.
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However, I find that most of the time, using React is unnecessary for simpler applications.
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Typically, it's a single action, like clicking a button, which works seamlessly.
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The most basic live view setup leverages sigils for creating data structures that validate HTML.
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It swiftly updates whenever assigns are modified or the socket state changes.
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You can connect actions through Phoenix clicks to handle dynamic updates from the client side.
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To increase your thermostat's temperature, you create a button linked to the socket, enabling real-time adjustments.
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The final reason, reason ten, is Livebook.
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It's akin to Jupyter, with sections of markdown allowing for organized documentation.
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You can run code cells, create graphs, and include API forms for interactive exploration.
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You can run queries directly within Livebook, or create stand-alone Livebook components.
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In relation to Phoenix, you can connect your Livebook to a running instance.
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This enables live experimentation with your application and allows for broader use cases.
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At my work, we utilize Livebooks for visualizing data and analytics.
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They provide product teams insight into results without digging deeply into technicalities.
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Upcoming improvements to documentation will link more relevant assets directly into Livebook.
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It's an engaging way to present live documentation.
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As seen in recent updates, interactive forms boost communication and engagement.
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There’s a site that hosts Livebooks on the web, allowing immediate access for trials.
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There are numerous aspects I wish to discuss, but time does not permit.
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If you have more questions about Elixir or Phoenix, please feel free to approach me.
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I am active on Twitter and looking to stream more on Twitch.
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Thank you very much! Are there any questions? No questions?
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Thank you, Aaron, for this overview of Phoenix and Elixir.
