Dimitris Zorbas

A Livebook Smart-Cell to Render Diagrams

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote my first Livebook smart-cell which renders diagrams from a textual description.

ElixirConf.EU 2022

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This year’s ElixirConf marks Elixir’s 10th birthday, in the rest of this post I’m sharing my experience of what took place this time.

A Guide to Secure Elixir Package Updates

Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Keeping your dependencies up-to-date is essential to ensure that your applications stay healthy, secure, and performant. Thankfully, the BEAM ecosystem has its own package manager, Hex, which is fast, mature, and simple to use.

This article explores the available tools and commands to manage Hex dependencies and some tips to make the process more enjoyable.

Livebook Animations

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

An exciting new feature landed in Livebook (through Kino) which gives the ability to animate any output.

An Unusual Pomodoro Timer on Elixir and Nerves

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In my previous post about “Organising Book Highlights and Notes”, I wrote:

“Some day I may build a gadget for my desk to display a daily quote”.

A few days later, it’s on my desk and it couldn’t have been a better pretext to give Livebook on Nerves a try.

Organising Book Highlights and Notes

Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve used a variety of tools to organise my reading and notes. Given I spend a significant amount of my time studying, depending on 3rd parties gives me anxiety. Any of the tools I use, even the open-source offline-first ones, can become unmaintained, ridden with security vulnerabilities, slow or they may change in way which makes me reluctant to use them.

To some extent, this post is a sequel to “knowledge mapping”.

Phoenix Telemetry

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Telemetry is becoming the defacto library to instrument and publish metrics in Elixir apps. This post is a step-by-step guide to integrate Telemetry in a Phoenix app which leverages Opus.

sidekiq-dry

Sat, 16 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I published a new gem, sidekiq-dry aiming to tackle a variety of common frustrations when it comes to Sidekiq jobs and their arguments.

Knowledge Mapping

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

What do I know? What do we know?

How do we know what we know and what is there that we should know?

Writing a Command-Line Application in Elixir

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always been fascinated by well-made applications for the terminal. Who doesn’t install htop on a new machine, am I right? My plan was to build something that I’d use daily and other people would potentially find useful. Therefore I decided to build a cli app for Tefter. It’s built on Elixir and Ratatouille and it’s open-source. Check out the source or download and try it or install via brew.

A Slack bookmarking application in Elixir with Opus

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post describes how we used Elixir and Opus in one of our services at Tefter, which implements bookmarking collaboration in Slack. My relationship with Slack I remember, when Slack started getting viral and it was set as the main chat app at work, I was very reluctant to use it. I was quite happy with IRC and always in favour of open protocols. Since it supported an IRC / XMPP gateway, tweaking my irssi config and later finch was trivial and my overall experience was good.

ElixirConf.EU 2019

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was lucky enough to attend ElixirConf.EU for the third time and in this post I’m sharing some thoughts about the talks I saw, some of my notes and insights on the future of this community in general. Location I’d never visited Prague before and the conf was an amazing opportunity to combine business and pleasure. While writing this post though, a week after, I realised I didn’t visit most of the landmarks that I was planning to.

Observer Live

Tue, 02 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I published a demo of my port of observer_cli using LiveView. It took me a few of minutes to familiarise myself with this new web development concept. The docs are clear, accurate and provide a very smooth introduction to the capabilities of this interactive server-side rendering way of doing things. I have to say that I’m really impressed 🙂. You can try the demo yourself here. Or.. check out this gif.

The 10-minute Rails Pub/Sub

Sun, 17 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This time we’ll experiment with a quick way to architecture a Rails application to use Pub/Sub instead of model callbacks. What’s wrong with callbacks Rails active record models easily become bloated, that’s where most of the business logic tends to live after all. One of the most common sources of technical debt in Rails apps is callbacks. Models become god-objects with dependencies to other models, mailers and even 3rd party services.

100 Things a Software Architect Should Know

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A very short list of things a software architect should know:

Communication Patterns

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post is about communication patterns in software projects. For your organisation and its teams to be truly agile and effective you should build a communication system. Goals Keeping people focused, aligned and effective Sharing information in the right places Optimising incident response times Operational safety Your organisation is spending vast resources to optimise various parts of the technical infrastructure to help your developers work better. We all spend a fair amount of time communicating and the quality of the deliverable result of our work is largely affected by the accuracy and completeness of such communication.

ElixirConf.EU 2018

Sat, 09 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I attended ElixirConf.EU 2018, it took place in Warsaw this time. The food was fantastic, the weather was very favourable and the presentations a blast. The Food Announcement: This blog is from now on about food ..Not. That zapiecek place was sooo good though. We ate there almost twice a day. They had those ravioli-like pasta called pierogi, absolutely mouth-watering. I might visit Poland again just for the food! </food>

Effective Meetings

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is a recollection of thoughts on meetings and notes from one of my favourite books, high output management. Meetings have a bad name and people tend to nag about them. It doesn’t have to be like that. Most of us have been in a situation where we wish we could think of a good excuse to escape from a never-ending meeting. Meeting Types People’s time is highly valuable, so all meetings should be purposeful and well executed according to type.

Phoenix WebSockets Under a Microscope 🔬

Sun, 12 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a code-reading and exploration post about the WebSockets side of Phoenix. It builds upon some of the tracing techniques showcased in the previous post, to observe some of the internals of Phoenix. It also features some tricks I commonly employ to debug WebSocket related issues. The title and nature of this post are inspired by the marvellous book Ruby Under a Microscope written by Pat Shaughenessy. WebSockets The WebSocket Protocol enables two-way communication between a client running untrusted code in a controlled environment to a remote host that has opted-in to communications from that code

About

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m an Athenian Greek software engineer who lives in London. When I’m not busy making stuff, I’m breaking stuff. My guilty pleasure is that I really enjoy writing quality documentation. Public Key: B2FC 1D21 EAD4 974E 9139 761C D122 8308 112F 8610 Contact email keybase Social My Twitter GitHub Tefter Bookmarks Goodreads Spotify Speakerdeck Topics Distributed Systems System Architecture Functional Programming Ruby / Erlang / Elixir / Vim Product Building & Project Management Projects Tefter.

Debugging & Tracing Elixir Applications

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post describes a few useful techniques to debug running Erlang / Elixir applications. It is meant to be a cheatsheet of things you can do to inspect and alter the state of an application without requiring the installation of packages. For any of the code snippets below, autoverse refers to my local hostname, which itself refers to one of my favourite science fiction novels, “Permutation City” by Greg Egan.

Elixir.LDN 2017

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I returned from vacations in beautiful Greece (Amorgos island 🏝), to attend Elixir.LDN-2017 in London. General Feeling The venue was at a very convenient location and was well suited for the conference. I could see many familiar faces and felt like a supercharged edition of the London Elixir meetup. If you’re interested in attending the Elixir London meetups you probably want to join #london of the elixir-lang slack (get an invite) and the meetup.

Distillery releases with Docker multi-stage builds

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post describes the procedure to create lightweight Docker images, using multi-stage builds, to deploy Elixir applications packaged using Distillery. It is assumed that you’re familiar with Docker and Elixir. Multi-stage builds Since Docker version 17.05 you can have multi-stage builds. With such builds you can have a single Dockerfile contain multiple FROM instructions, separating multiple stages of a build, where artifacts from one stage can be used in the next and all resulting in a single image.

ElixirConf.EU 2017

Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I was in beautiful Barcelona for ElixirConf.EU 2017. In this post I’m sharing some of my notes and impressions about it. Team Quiqup [Zorbas, Hawkins, Rabe] Tutorials I attended the tutorial “Microservices under the Umbrella” by Makis Otman & Georgina McFadyen, both working for 8th Light. We hacked on code from the following repositories: https://github.com/Maikon/elixir_setup https://github.com/Maikon/pharos The was goal to create an umbrella application, going through the pros and cons of such an architecture.

Deploying Kitto with resin.io

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guide to deploy a Kitto dashboard application on a Raspberry Pi using resin.io. After you follow the steps below, you are expected to have a dashboard running on a raspberry connected to a TV which displays the dashboard full-screen using firefox. Expected end result Kitto is an open-source framework for dashboards, written in Elixir. It is focused on requiring minimal maintenance and system resources. It can be developed using the widespread grid layout of Dashing and features jobs like the following:

Software Packaging Guidelines

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post is an collection common practices for software packaging. The ultimate goal is to be able to define a set of guidelines, which can be applied to a wide range of projects, aiming to build up confidence in using the packaged source. Continuous Delivery..sort of Focus of this post The objective of the guidelines below is to increase efficiency in communication and raise awareness on good packaging practices.

My year with Elixir

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I started fiddling with Elixir about 1.5 year ago. Today I feel like sharing my experience with the language. I’ve been coding with Ruby for the past 5 years (mostly around the Rails ecosystem) and I try to learn a new programming language every year. 2016 is definitely the year of Elixir for me. My original curiosity for the language, unfolded to a quest to learn about distributed applications following the path of Erlang.