_virtu

I've been in elixir for nigh a decade now and the one thing that you can try to pry from my cold dead hands is the BEAM. Elixir and Gleam are my go to languages right now and damn are they fun to write and reason in, but the part that has left me never wanting to leave the ecosystem is BEAM + OTP.

- BEAM makes monoliths sexy. You don't have to worry about a bunch of microservices, just focus on using proper process division for modeling your problem. - Debugging on the BEAM is first class. Drop into an interactive shell, pull up telemetry, or recon and hammer down on where your live app is slowing down if your metrics have a blindspot.

I could go on and on. I'm constantly blown away every day by the amount of time and effort and all of the sage learnings in distributed computing problems that came out of Ericsson that became the foundation of erlang + OTP + BEAM and in turn elixir + Gleam.

At least for me, I pirate music, but I make an effort to contribute directly to the bottom line for artists. This is best done by buying overpriced merch at shows or donating directly if possible.

Have you tried reaching out to people who have installed your app and asking what they did and why they did it?

Why does the JavaScript ecosystem pride itself in not having a framework? That’s the very thing that drove me out of the ecosystem. JavaScript was my first professional language of focus and I was in love with the growth oriented mentality as a younger engineer, but the part that irked me was that I had to constantly be rebuilding the same set of patterns with different tooling, which is the special choose your own adventure hell that is the JS ecosystem.

I left it for elixir and Phoenix and never looked back. There’s just no true ownership and direction that can come close to that of Jose Valim and Chris McCord in the JS ecosystem. It’s so fragmented that it takes the fun out of maintaining a JS codebase.

I came here thinking that there would be more comments discussing this. This seems like the wrong direction to go for fixing the comfort problem. Tilting your wrists down like that is not proper typing posture.

Thanks for the rundown. I just started using cmux and the pane behavior you’re describing is my biggest gripe. I’ll check this out.

In my spare time https://bookclub.cloud.

It’s a tool that leverages your drm free ebooks to help manage your book clubs. The epub file offers more rich info such as:

- word counts per reading

- chapter selection

- the ability to highlight sections and share

- ai summarization and spoiler free discussion about the contents of a given reading

I use it for my own book club right now. I doubt I’ll be able to monetize the app due to the need for drm free epubs which is a pretty high barrier for entry to most non-technical users.

My long term plans would be to have an agent help readers learn hand in hand while reading. I’d like to have the agent facilitate deeper analysis by prompting the users and clubs with questions that encourage more critical analysis of each section. I’ve been building all the infrastructure for running the club so that’s the next more interesting step I haven’t explored yet.

That's not the only reason I was using the tooling at the time. Specifically everything else regarding the JetBrains ecosystem kept me hooked, but when I was looking to replace what I liked in JetBrains with other tooling the last piece of the puzzle was replacing the git workflow.

Remember this type of comment. Never let yourself fall into this type of thinking when trying to understand what your users want.

Instead of passing judgement on why someone values something, why not ask?

For example, if you were to ask me why I chose to keep using an IDE that I had spent years of my life building muscle memory using perhaps you would get a better understanding of the specific part of the lifecycle I was at when paying for software.

It's not that the git gui was the reason why I signed up for the software in the first place. The git gui was the last reason for me to not jump ship when switching to something like neovim or helix. This was during a time where LSP was becoming popular so refactoring tools and intellisense were finally getting better adoption outside of the JetBrains tooling. Most of this was achievable with editor du jour + lsp plugins, but the git ui was the one piece I hadn't personally solved outside of the JetBrains ecosystem.

What’s stopping you from using it in the terminal view of VSCode? Perhaps I’m misunderstanding your comment so please forgive me if I am.

Maybe you’re saying that you wish VSCose itself was a TUI?

The commit workflow was what kept me locked in to the ecosystem for so long. LazyGit was so good that it convinced me I didn’t need JetBrains anymore. If you love the workflow with JB for commits check out LazyGit. It’s a TUI so you can use it in any editor without much friction.

I’ve been a JetBrains toolbox subscriber for over a decade. I used to run trainings for new hires to get them up to speed on the eco system as our team would provide licenses. I say all of this because I was about as fanboy as you could get for them.

They’ve dropped the ball over the past five years. Part of me thinks it was the war in Ukraine that did them in. The quality of tooling and the investment in Fleet and AI slop was the death nell for me. I was slated to renew at the grandfathered price on the 17th and decided to let my subscription lapse this year because the value prop just isn’t strong enough anymore.

Hey OP I’m building a bookclub app. Do you happen to have an api I could plug into? I’d love to add this to our member suggestions section.

First I’d like to state that if you look at my post history I’ve been here far before the bleed in from Reddit. Your whole response is pretty cynical and leads in the negative direction so I don’t know how you would want to have a positive interaction with your comment, but I’ll try anyway.

Regarding “woe is me, I don’t get to do whatever I want”. No, that’s not the way that I’m thinking. It’s more that people CAN feel this way at one point or another in this society of ours. The original comment that I responded too was simply belittling the op for having those types of thoughts. It’s valid and important to address those feelings. Whether or not you can do anything to change the way society is based on those is another story.

I do believe that there is an actual discussion to be had about adjusting our society to allow for a more healthy balance, that’s not stacked against the middle and lower classes. I love my craft as a software engineer and I plan to continue working even if I make it to retirement. It’s just that the system we live in could be more kind to the people in it.

I love HN, but this type of mentality is pretty toxic and isn’t conducive to the healthy conversations that I enjoy in it AWAY from Reddit.

I mean the grandparent poster isn’t wrong. This whole system is stacked against us.

It’s difficult to keep moving knowing that we don’t have the ability to opt out of the way our whole society works. This is a very broad discussion that I know has many different facets to it, but the grandparent poster seems to be calling out what a lot of people believe is true.

I’m currently building something like this. It comes at the problem from a different angle though. The app uses the book to aid discussions for the current reading sections.

Fun to see this idea is getting a little traction.

> ORMs are the devil in all languages and all implementations. Just write the damn SQL

I was agreeing with most opinions and then I saw this one. Having used Ecto from the elixir ecosystem completely changed my mind on this. It's an amazing piece of software.

Thanks for your recommendation. I ended up not putting it down because of this comment. :)

I will say that it’s nice that you need explicit imports in Gleam. Elixir does not require this and a lot of code in our codebase suffers from unspecified imports which can be difficult to follow.

It doesn’t right now, but it will. Jose and company have been working on a gradual type system. Elixir 1.17 recently released the first typing features.

I watched it. Thank you for the recommendation.

Sounds absolutely fascinating. I just started the second Hyperion book, but I might have to put it down to prioritize this. It does seem like somewhat of an investment though; as if reading it in bed might not be the most optimal way to enjoy the experience. It might require some more dedicated reading sessions from what I'm seeing in the other threads.

This is hilarious. I bought the book after watching Blade Runner 2049. There's a scene where some of book was being recited as part of the protagonist's anti-empathy test and I figured it had to have a deeper importance to the writers so I grabbed it on a whim. It's been sitting on my shelf. Now I'll have to move it up the list after seeing this.

- The identity trap: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/712961/the-identity...

I really like "The identity trap" it's one of the few socio-political books that helps to make sense of a lot of the current social media landscape, and political landscape.

I'm curious as to why. I finally went all in on neovim about two years ago and have been having an amazingly stable experience.

On the other hand, I'm listening to a new album at least three times a week. Using tools like last.fm and some private trackers helps to keep things fresh. Never give up on finding that next tune!

I’ve been craving some Physics courses since it’s been about a decade since I was in school. I picked up a Classical Mechanics book to get back into the swing of things and of course it went through some basic linear algebra. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about the dot product of two vectors.

You know what blew me away though? Not one textbook I looked in mentioned “why” the dot product is important; that is it’s useful for determining the similarity of two vectors. They all focused on the mechanical details of computing the dot product, but never spelled out the reason it can be useful. I went through a few other resources before I broke down and had a little chat with ChatGPT to discuss the meaning behind it and it makes perfect sense after that.

In comparison to when I was in college, things are much slower paced so I can take the time I need to ensure I have a full grasp of a concept before moving forward. I guess all of this is to say that as I’ve continued forward through more concepts I keep finding that the books I’m reading offer a mechanical view instead of a holistic view of the material. This feels like the biggest issue with most math books I’ve read and it makes me wonder where books that offer more semantic meaning of concepts instead of recipes exist.

And their status page says otherwise. :)

Re the monolith vs micro service problem; this is why I love elixir and Phoenix.

No discussion of using labels to find similar music?

Thanks for the clarification on suicide vs assisted suicide. Yes, I do agree that the discussion in the book is about assisted suicide. It's been about a year since I've read it, so those details evaded me.

I do understand where the author was going with the discussion regarding assisted suicide, but the timing of the argument and the amount of time spent on it at the point in the story is the root of my main objection with presenting it.

Throughout most of the book, there's very little regarding ethics at least with the amount of painstaking detail that it's presented in, in comparison to the assisted suicide discussion. The discussion felt bolted on as it was presented around the fever pitch of the story just before a global nuclear war is about to break loose, we get bludgeoned over the head by a priest that's fervently against assisted suicide. The placement of the argument and the timing is just awkward in my opinion.

Again, this book touches on a lot of interesting ideas ahead of its time but the execution feels weak and confused. I would have preferred that each part remain completely separate honestly.

And of course, all of this is based on my taste. I recognize that this is considered a seminal piece of science fiction. In general I find myself fairly forgiving when attempting to read something I normally wouldn't, but this took the cake for me in regards to the amount of pain per page I suffered while trying to make it through.