I got really into Elixir/Erlang a while ago, and it made me love programming again. One of the first 'useful' things I built was to scratch a personal itch: tracking all the comments on HN that I've read and, with a bit of JS, highlighting any new comments.
Erlang, OTP and Elixir were pretty new to me, and on top of that I built everything in a rush. The code is messy, naive, and the whole thing barely works. Over time I've added some other Applications (in the Elixir/Erlang sense of the word) that scratch various other itches. Most of that code is also pretty shit.
The fact that the whole thing has been chugging along for over a year, with no restarts or crashing the entire system, is a regular reminder to me of Armstrong and the "let it crash" philosophy. I sometimes log in to the server and face a wall of red because the happy path wasn't followed, and instead of having to fix the bug and start the thing up, I can just forget about it. Or I fix the bug, enter recompile() in the interactive console, and get on with my day.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that seeing how my duct-taped-together contraption chugs along and keeps doing its job gives me a small sense of joy every single time I SSH into the server, and it motivates me to get better at all this so I can do the same on "MongoDB level web scale".
And it's not just Armstrong's work. His openness and participation on the Elixir forums, his 'stamp of approval', so to speak, as well as his talks, played a big role in my decision to get into Elixir/OTP.
Erlang, OTP and Elixir were pretty new to me, and on top of that I built everything in a rush. The code is messy, naive, and the whole thing barely works. Over time I've added some other Applications (in the Elixir/Erlang sense of the word) that scratch various other itches. Most of that code is also pretty shit.
The fact that the whole thing has been chugging along for over a year, with no restarts or crashing the entire system, is a regular reminder to me of Armstrong and the "let it crash" philosophy. I sometimes log in to the server and face a wall of red because the happy path wasn't followed, and instead of having to fix the bug and start the thing up, I can just forget about it. Or I fix the bug, enter recompile() in the interactive console, and get on with my day.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that seeing how my duct-taped-together contraption chugs along and keeps doing its job gives me a small sense of joy every single time I SSH into the server, and it motivates me to get better at all this so I can do the same on "MongoDB level web scale".
And it's not just Armstrong's work. His openness and participation on the Elixir forums, his 'stamp of approval', so to speak, as well as his talks, played a big role in my decision to get into Elixir/OTP.