Soon I will be back in my office chair for significant time most days of the week. I am very excited. There are many things rolling around my head that I want to execute on.

Currently very keen to talk to companies trying to hire Elixir developers and have a chat about what the major challenges are. If you are doing this or have someone to refer, send them to lars@underjord.io.

Anything going on with the ol' Elixir?

The Elixir community seems to have been doing okay in spite of my parental leave. Alex Koutmos of BEAM Radio fame has just published a very cool post on Livebook over on the Dashbit blog. Apparently he is now in illustrious company and I expect him to stop returning my DMs shortly. Regardless I think he shows off some fantastic usages of Livebook here along with some new funnctionality he helped introduce.

Livebook spawned as part of the general push into machine learning with the Nx project. There seems to be more and more things just popping up and out around Nx. There are efforts that should eventually let people who've built models in Python bring them right over and run them under Nx and Elixir as well as a ton of other stuff. Not my field but I just recently spoke to someone doing intensive non-ML calculations. They had a library based on a NIF do the work. They switched to Nx with the XLA CPU backend and saw a big improvement. If they ever need to multiply it they can likely throw a GPU at it. This does a lot of good for heavy calculation work in Elixir overall. Not just ML/AI.

Nerves is growing the supported systems to combat the lack of hardware available on shelves. Introducing the first RISC-V system with the Mango Pi MQ Pro which is a Raspberry Pi look-alike which is getting more and more support as people chip away at the differences. A NervesConf 2 is announced in connection to ElixirConf US and if you plan to go to ElixirConf it should be a no-brainer to work NervesConf into the plan. I won't be making it because of the very small baby situation.

I'm very excited about the general attention SQLite is getting these days and if you follow me you might have seen that it is fully supported with Ecto via the exqlite project. Love that. To add some safety to a SQLite I would use Litestream. And to spare me the work of deploying that Alex Koutmos (again) has already built that library (litestream on Hex.pm). This is a database that when put on a single server can be pushed very far. If you do multi-tenancy with it for a SaaS you can cheaply provide each customer a database that is easy to throw at them when the GDPR requires it. Tons of fun.

Fly.io is doing some interesting stuff with Ben who made Litestream and their ambition is some kind of distributed SQLite. I'm not sure I'm bought in, I'm curious to see where it goes. I'm mostly after operational simplicity and not necessarily about SQLite as a distributed database. Again, very curious to see what they achieve. Beyond that their platform is very convenient for setting up widely distributed Elixir with private cluster connectivity. They also support Phoenix/LiveView development. They hired Chris McCord. That is all in all rad.

If you haven't been following Phoenix and LiveView closely I'll rehash some things I really like. The asset build pipeline is now Esbuild and you don't need Node.js or NPM to get rolling with Phoenix. The ever popular Tailwind CSS that I rather like is also available in a similar manner (though it probably brings in Node under the hood, not sure). You bring in this tailwind package and voíla (now you get to configure things!). I have had very few  problems with recent setups of the asset pipeline which is an immense improvement as they are often a weak spot of any web framework.

There's also the work Brooklin Myers is doing with DockYard for an Elixir academy. I've spoken to Brooklin previously over DMs and video (in spite of the time difference!) and I think he will do a great job. The curriculum is intended to be open and you can be involved here.

There is also research around some type-system stuff. Nothing I'm very interested in so dig into it yourselves if you care about it. There's other cool stuff all around as people bash different pieces of technology together and produce new sparks or sparkles.

For ongoing news-summaries I recommend the Thinking Elixir podcast. They do a fantastic job and they always have a news segment aside from their very good guest selection. Mark was a machine of consistency with Elixir Mix and Thinking Elixir has been no different.

Anyway, I feel like Elixir is chugging along at a very good pace. The language barely changes in any annoying way. Elixir and Phoenix have been steady performers for a significant time now. Nx is pushing into a realm I never thought Elixir would have strength in. It was always good at orchestrating work but I didn't expect to have great tools to do ML or heavy math from Elixir "directly". That's a weakness being chipped away. Asset pipeline, also weak parts being removed. The number of things I wouldn't use Elixir for is continuously shrinking and there are things it can do that basically nothing else does. Also plenty of devs wanting to get into it, plenty of companies choosing it.

Am I missing some amazing development? Do you have another perspective? Let me know at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate it.

- Lars Wikman