Cogini Blog
Featured articles
Deploying an Elixir app to Digital Ocean with mix_deploy Port forwarding with iptables
Serving Phoenix static assets from a CDN
Phoenix is fast, but you can improve performance by serving requests for static files like images, CSS and JS from Nginx or a content delivery network (CDN). This allows your app to focus on dynamic content. Serving static assets from Nginx If you are running your app behind Nginx, configure … Read more…
Advantages of Elixir vs Golang
A prospect recently asked me what the advantages are of Elixir over Golang. The simple answer is productivity. You get the best of both worlds: the productivity of a high level language with the scaling power of the mature Erlang platform. For financial and health care applications, there is also … Read more…
Yield optimization vs customer service
Whenever we try to squeeze the last bit of utilization out of a system, there is a danger that it will have a big negative impact on the user experience. A great example of this is overbooking in the airline industry. Usually a bad customer experience does not involve getting … Read more…
Incrementally migrating large Rails apps to Phoenix
Here are the slides for the presentation on incrementally migrating large Rails apps to Phoenix I gave at Ruby Elixir Conf Taiwan 2018. Read more…
Is Elixir/Phoenix ready for production?
How I evaluated Elixir in 2014 when we were deciding whether it was mature enough Read more…
Setting Ansible variables based on the environment
When deploying applications, we we usually have the same basic architecture in different environments (dev, test, prod), but settings differ. Some settings are common to all the machines in the environment, e.g. the db server connection string. We need to vary the size of instances depending on the environment … Read more…
What makes a language popular?
In the recent HackerRank developer survey, we can see "Which languages do employers look for by industry?" and "Which languages are developers planning to learn next?" In terms of popularity, there is a definite swing to JavaScript and Python. In terms of mind share with language enthusiasts, not so much … Read more…
KYC wall of shame
There is a saying that frustration is an occupational hazard of being a user experience designer (or an excessively logical engineer). Once you start designing processes, you see process problems everywhere, whether or not you want to. As an American living in Taiwan, I am used to being the weird … Read more…
Debugging your space probe
Years ago we were building an embedded vehicle tracker for commercial vehicles. The hardware used an ARM7 CPU, GPS and GPRS modem, running uClinux. We ran into a tough bug in the initial application startup process. The program that read from the GPS and sent location updates to the network … Read more…
Is it time for Lisp in DevOps?
We have been working on a project migrating a big Rails app from physical hardware to AWS, and I have been doing a lot of automation work. It strikes me how we are doing the same thing over and over with different tools: reading variables, templating files and running semi-declarative … Read more…