I have just finished migrating a suite of Elixir projects from distillery to mix release. A key part of that change is that all environment variables need to be called from the runtime.exs rather than the various env.exs files.

This is part of a project to move to build once, deploy many times approach.

While working on this I found a few cases where the staging envitonment files inhereted from production. This is a big problem as you may turn things on in production later and not realise that the staging system (which can have a larger number of possible users) will also be using production.

I untangled the config into distinct files (keeping everything as it was) and only when it was reviewed it revealed certain production settings we don’t want in staging.

This relates to the talk Simple Made Easy.

No matter how many ptogramming languages you know there is always another that you need.

Currently I am learning Elm with the next stop being Rust.

The Elm ecosystem is slightly broken on M1 Macs (including via Docker). My plan to reduce the pain is to use Storybook.