Using Livebook as a Model

I have been having a quick experiment with livebook.

This is an interactive website that can be used to easily share Elixir code.
Think of it as Juypter Notebooks but with the backing system being Elixir rather than Python.

It has a very neat docker image:

docker run -p 8080:8080 livebook/livebook

This will stand up a local website running livebook. The console will give you a link (including a token) to allow you to access it.

You can create notebooks and add sections in Markdown or Elixir.
The great thing is that these can be interactively edited by multiple concurrent users.
You can also export a notebook as a file, publish the details and import it into another livebook.

I have been thinking about using this to recreate an old mac simulation tool. This tool allowed you to build a model with data flowing through it and you could use it to see bottlenecks.

I have three code blocks:

The first is the initialisation block

Agent.start_link(fn -> 0 end, name: :complete)
Agent.start_link(fn -> 0 end, name: :iteration)
Agent.start_link(fn -> 0 end, name: :qa_backlog)

The second is the update block

Agent.update(:iteration, fn x -> x + 1 end)
Agent.update(:complete, fn x -> x + min(10, Agent.get(:qa_backlog, & &1)) end)
Agent.update(:qa_backlog, fn value -> max(value - 10, 0) end )
Agent.update(:qa_backlog, fn value -> value + 20 end)

The third is the output block

:ok = IO.puts "Iteration #{Agent.get(:iteration, & &1)} Backlog #{Agent.get(:qa_backlog, & &1)} Complete #{Agent.get(:complete, & &1)}"

If you put the three blocks into livebook then you have the start of a model.

This is a very simplistic model. It attempts to show that the QA team will never be able to keep up with the two dev teams feeding it work. This could become far more sophisticated (with a random percentage of QA items failing and being returned to the teams). The idea here is to show how you can use an Agent in livebook.

I am going to see if you can add visualisations.