Devon C. Estes

From Elixir to Erlang

It's been a while since I've written here, partly because I've been taking care of my kids mostly solo for a while while my wife is out of town, but also because I've been working with a new client since the middle of April. »

Decoding Dialyzer - Part 1

Dialyzer can be a tricky tool to figure out, but it can also be really helpful in spotting bugs or inaccurate typespecs for us, so I'm going to go through a couple of the more common warnings that you'll see in your daily use of Dialyzer to help understand what's happening, some of the causes of those common warnings, and how you can resolve them. »

Soft delete with Ecto 3 and Postgres

One thing that folks sometimes want or need to do is to be able to "soft delete" records in a database. This means that instead of actually removing the record from a database, you in some way keep it there but make it "invisible" to your application. »

Unit Tests in Elixir - Part 3

In part 1 of this series I went over a couple rules that I follow when writing unit tests, and in part 2 I showed how to unit test GenServers. Today, though, we're gonna be getting our hands dirty and breaking some of those rules that I laid out in part 1. I mean, what good are rules if you don't break them every now and then! »