About Justin
Hi, my name is Justin. I’m a software developer based in Edmonton, Canada. I enjoy reading, writing, and collaborating on code.
Why make a blog?
This blog is meant to help me explore Elixir features, and hopefully help others explore Elixir as well. If you have feedback, please message me.
Why Elixir?
- Elixir is built on BEAM. For why that is important, check out the youtube video The Soul of Erlang and Elixir, by Saša Jurić.
- Elixir is fun; it implements modern ideas in a fresh way.
- Elixir is a stable, robust language.
- I appreciate the leadership of José Valim and the Elixir community. Ecto and Phoenix are brilliantly designed. mix and hex.pm are examples of great tooling. Broadway and Absinthe are cutting edge.
- Excellent reference documentation, and excellent book authors as well.
How did you discover Elixir?
On a landmark night I wandered over to YouTube and watched GOTO 2014 • Idioms for Building Distributed Fault-tolerant Applications with Elixir by José Valim. Fascinated and intrigued I picked up and read Dave Thomas’s Programming Elixir book. Halfway through the book I knew I was hooked. Things spiraled from there. I read through all the available Elixir books at the time, and started reading blogs on the Elixir Radar newsletter. Now I am implementing projects for myself, and am intrigued by all things Elixir.
What did you use before Elixir?
Before discovering Elixir I used C, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Perl, Python, and Ruby. I still enjoy these languages.
What else do you like to do for fun?
I enjoy working out, bicycling, swimming, reading, playing chess, and dying alot in Star Wars Battlefront.