I am working through the Programming Elixir book.

I am experimenting with a mix of OSX and Windows.

Intelij IDEA does provide a free ide that works for Elixir

However on windows some of the run commands need to be changed

mix run -e ‘Issues.CLI.run([“-h”])’

needs to be replaced with:

mix run -e “Issues.CLI.run([‘-h’])”

Given the upcoming demise of snap-ci I have been working on finding a replacement.

Snap-ci allowed my team to work exclusively on a single master branch and have tests run on every push. From this it could be manually pushed to a series of environments in a strict order:

qa -> demo -> live

We assessed a large range of cloud hosted providers to attempt to replicate this.

Gitlab came close, but was too unreliable  (eventual consistency left a ui that was inconsistent on a single page!)

Circle-ci is our current contender. We can build everything that we need but temporarily  have resorted to Jenkins to provide our deployment pipelines. Circle-ci have promised that these will be available soon (within a few months).

Circle CI does respond very rapidly to git pushes (something that snap-ci had been rather sluggish). The integrated error log viewing is a distinct improvement  (snap made you download a tarfile containg a zip of the test reports – it was three steps to see the detailed error).

We looked at using heroku build pipelines but found it lacking in the hooks needed for pre-deploy steps. We use these to trigger our database migrations (also cdn and cms configuration ) before restarting the apps.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/nsomar.com/java-elixir/amp/

git log cd15930.. –oneline

The first is the github hash of the previously deployed build.

This allows a quick summary of what has changed.

Here are the samples from the excellent book:

https://github.com/francescoc/scalabilitywitherlangotp.git

This means that the fitbit has got into a confused state.

It needs to be rebooted as follows:

http://help.fitbit.com/articles/en_US/Help_article/1186

Plug into the charging cable with a power source (PC or mains).

Hold down the button for about 20s

It should then restart. This should not clear the data on the device.

However it may not have counted steps during the crash.

The Software Miniture is a concept that I came up with when experimenting with code generation. Its a cut down version of a larger application with a  minimal implementation of the concepts of a larger application. The idea was to perform experiments on the miniture that would be much faster than on the full application.

This idea also seems to be useful when chosing a replacement CI server.

2017 comes with the decommissioning of two cloud ci providers.

Snap-CI and Bamboo-CI are both shutting down.

Snap-ci provided a build pipeline (triggered by a github webhook) with log and artefact viewing. This was all configured using a clean UI which allowed environment variables to be stored as either plaintext or securely.

Finding a replacement is not simple. The options seem to include options without a ui to specify the pipelines or are much more expensive.

The roll your own optiona are complex possibly including docker hosted travis.

This open source pivot table (http://nicolas.kruchten.com/pivottable/examples/local.html) brings the power of Lotus Improv to the web.

Lotus Improv was a groundbreaking spreadsheet that was based upon pivot tables rather than a simple grid. Lotus killed it as it was cannibalising it’s own Lotus 1-2-3 sales.

The pivot table above allows you to load a csv file (say the output of a Bigquery query) and then perform ad-hoc pivot analysis on it.  By dragging the column headings around you get to see your data summarised in your browser.  The sample could easily be extended to run a report from say a S3 bucket. This means that we could email links to pivot tables around…