Hacking Until The Baby Comes

Although there hasn’t been any updates to this blog, I actually have been hacking away and learning some new tools which I’m very excited about. My wife has been pregnant for the last 9 months, and I’ve had to prioritize baby preparations above my blog updates. Now that most of my preparations are in place, I can finally take a breath and look at this blog again while we wait. My baby boy can come any day now (anyone have stories of hacking in between newborn raising?).

The tools I’ve been excited about are Elixir and the wonderful Phoenix Framework.

After finding and falling in love with Erlang and it’s virtual machine about a year ago, I’m finally able to pump that love into the very lovely Elixir build tools and Phoenix Framework in order to productively create interactive ‘Web 2.0’ apps.

Following that, I’ve been learning about Riak and Postgres databases. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve relied heavily on frameworks to handle database queries in the past, and that reliance has left me quite SQL unsavvy. However, like a good grasshopper, I’ve found sql-ex.com and have begun working through the excercises.

I’ve kept a few notes while studying Erlangg/OTP, and have learned a thing or two about building web applications using Phoenix/Ecto/Brunch, so I’ll aim to get those into this blog sometime.

But, I’ll suposedly have no time once that baby pops out. Hopefully the hacking suffers minimally :)

Edit: The baby came six days after this post, and I decided to write about Fatherhood and Hacking in a new section, /hacker-dad/.

Cheers,

---