akoutmos

As someone getting into the hardware side of things and building my own data acquisition tools for my cars, I thought this video had some really cool techniques and might be useful for others.

The CAN bus side of things starts at 8m05s

To clarify, the OP said: "I have neither time nor workshop space to solder and assemble anything more trivial than "plug a sensor into an ESP32 and screw both into a box"."

The book is very much "plug in a sensor" style as everything is connected via Qwiic cables.

I have been using LiveView for over a year now in production applications, and I must say...it has been a breath of fresh air when developing web applications. The amount of product that you can deliver per unit time is unmatchable (in my opinion of course). The ceiling for what you can accomplish with a single tech stack (Elixir in this case) has definitely been lifted considerably.

Demo applications such as this show exactly what is possible in this tech stack and should make you question whether you need to make that leap to an SPA. At some point you will possibly need to lean on an SPA tool like Vue or React, but I think that point is now further away with tools like LiveView (Elixir), Hotwire (Ruby), and Livewire (PHP).

For a lot of the LiveView applications that I write (which is actually quite a few these days), I will usually lean on something like AlpineJS for frontend specific interactions, and my LiveView state is for things that require backend state.

For example, if I have a flag to show/hide a modal to confirm a resource delete, the show/hide flag would live in AlpineJS, while the resource I was deleting would live in the state of my LiveView.

This way, there are no round trips to the server over websocket to toggle the modal. Hopefully that example makes sense :).

In my day to day work I don't write many GenServers either and I think that's a good thing. Like any tool, they can be overused and abused. It is best to stick to modules and pure functions until you really need to pull the stateful lever.

To that point, GenServers as an abstraction are super powerful and when applicable, are an amazing tool. For example, being able to control the initialization of a supervision trees using :ignore in the init callback can be handy to run DB migrations as part of the application startup. Or when used in combination with a registry it can be useful to hold on to user data in a GenServer and access it atomically across your cluster.

Author here. Glad you like the banner image and the zooming effect :).

Perhaps I miscommunicated what I took away from the StackOverflow survey. The point that I was trying to make was that in relation to other programming languages in the survey, Elixir ranked high with regards to how loved it is. The StackOverflow survey is just one data point in addition to the others that I bring up and like many surveys has it's own issues (like WebAssembly being a compilation target as opposed to a programming language the people program in).

Thanks for the kind words :)

That standalone HTTP server in PromEx can also be used to expose metrics in non-Phoenix applications. In the coming weeks you'll also be able to run GrafanaAgent in the PromEx supervision tree so you can push Prometheus metrics via remote_write. Stay tuned ;)!

As someone who has been programming with Elixir for my day job for the past few years, I find this aspect of the language to be super pragmatic and productive. It's a nice feeling to not have to chase new language features and syntax and focus more on the problem at hand. In addition, I've never felt limited by the language given that the underlying constructs are so powerful (message passing, immutability, pattern matching, etc). Glad that Jose made the decision that he did.