Designing Elixir Systems With OTP
by II James Edward Gray, Bruce Tate · first published 2019
78% recommend22% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Case-study walkthrough of building real-world Elixir programs with OTP, using a quiz game as the running example; suits engineers who already know the basics and need supervision trees and system design.
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I usually recommend "Designing Elixir Systems with OTP: Write Highly Scalable, Self-Healing Software with Layers" (2019 James Edward Gray, II, Bruce A. Tate) One may also find it interesting how Elixir/Phoenix-framework uses the OTP to greatly simplify implementation.…
on “Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software” ↗I would recommend: "Designing Elixir Systems with OTP: Write Highly Scalable, Self-Healing Software with Layers" ( James Edward Gray, II, Bruce A. Tate ) Erlang, and its simplified Elixir wrapper language can allow a OTP child process to continually crash…
on “The Modern Observability Problem” ↗…contexts are boundaries, places where you use process machinery and might call other subsystems, or services, but they’re not the application’s public API. You might want to check Bruce Tate’s book “ Designing Elixir Systems with OTP”.
on “Naming Elixir Phoenix context functions” ↗OTP allows multiple versions in concurrent upgrades across a cluster. Additionally: testing, performance profiling, and debugging are natively supported. Recommend reading: "Designing Elixir Systems with OTP: Write Highly Scalable, Self-Healing Software with Layers" ( James Edward Gray, II, Bruce A. Tate)
on “Erlang: The coding language that finance forgot” ↗…and GRPC offer. Also, have a look at the Phoenix Framework Channels examples, as it essentially replaces most simple micro-services architectures. This recipe book covers the common design examples: "Designing Elixir Systems with OTP: Write Highly Scalable, Self-Healing Software with Layers" (James Edward Gray, II, Bruce A. Tate) One day, you too may get annoyed with IT complexity, and articles mostly written by LLM chatbots. Happy…
on “Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency” ↗…touching ETS or Application, which is built on ETS, in nearly every operation. If the author wishes to learn how to design services in Elixir, or any BEAM language, with OTP, they can take a look at "Designing Elixir Systems with OTP" by by James Edward Gray and Bruce Tate, and "Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix" by Lance Halvorsen.
on “Show HN: I wrote a new BitTorrent tracker in Elixir” ↗…forward and you don't have to worry about much more than functions and modules. OPT, which is how you build supervision trees and other more complex Elixery things, is tricky at first but reading through Designing Elixir Systems with OTP, by James Edward Gray & Bruce A. Tate, and The Little Elixir & OTP Guidebook, by Benjamin Tan Wei Hao should clear it up fairly well. This is highly subjective, of course, but I've written code in C,…
on “Build a real-time Twitter clone with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5” ↗I can also recommend Programming Phoenix. I've also heard good things about the LiveView courses on the Pragmatic Studio. "Programming Elixir" and "Designing Elixir Systems with OTP" are also good, the former more so if you get started. From what I remember "Programming Phoenix" was enough to get started though, and these two books are better at getting deeper knowledge of Elixir/OTP.
on “Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative” ↗"Designing Elixir Systems with OTP" is a great book. It's not intending to teach you the basics of the language, it is instead teaching you how to architect real world programs, using a particular case study that they work through (a…
on “Ask HN: Books that teach you programming languages via systems projects?” ↗OTP is different, but there are a lot of good resources for understanding it. I liked: Elixir in Action. The Little OTP Book. Designing Elixir Systems with OTP. Pragmatic Studio's Elixir OTP course.
on “Erlang/OTP 25.0 Release” ↗Ignore OTP for the most part. Just write good code that works at one level at a time. Then when you hit something that needs OTP I send them towards Designing Elixir Systems with OTP https://pragprog.com/titles/jgotp/designing-elixir-systems-w... This is all about the onboarding experience of engineers coming onto a team. So you have to be careful with the projects that engineers…
on “Phoenix 1.7 is View-less” ↗Once you are familiar with either Erlang or Elixir I strongly recommend the book "Designing Elixir Systems with OTP" (the one with the bee and honeycomb on the front). It's not a programming tutorial, but it shows how to structure real world programs to make best use of what you get with Beam+OTP+Er{lang,lixir}. It's…
on “Ask HN: What is the best way to learn Erlang?” ↗…position. Some previous books I've read / enjoyed: * The makings of an Expert Engineer * Designing data intensive applications (haven't finished, moved house and lost the book, want to pick it up again) * Designing Elixir Systems with OTP * Practical Common Lisp I feel like I have learned a bit with the Elixir/CL books, inwhich I apply to how i write python, but I never branch out to doing my own projects in these languages, so I feel…
on “Ask HN: Reading list for being a better engineer?” ↗There are some books focused on OTP: * Erlang and OTP in Action; * Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP: Implement Robust, Fault-Tolerant Systems; * Designing Elixir Systems with OTP (in beta).
on “Ten Years of Erlang” ↗…Real-Time Phoenix 2019 - $26.95 - Programming Ecto 2019 - $28.95 - Programming Phoenix 1.4 (Current version is 1.6) 2019 - $26.95 - Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir 2019 - $24.95 - Designing Elixir Systems with OTP 2018 - $27.95 - Programming Elixir 1.6 (Current version is 1.14) 2018 - $27.95 - Craft GraphQL APIs in Elixir with Absinthe 2018 - $26.95 - Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix…
on “Joy of Elixir (2020)” ↗