Recent Posts

Converting A Traditional Controller Driven App To Phoenix LiveView - Part 1

September 25, 2019 8 minutes read

This is part 1 of a 2 part post. In this one, we'll move from a traditional Phoenix controller-driven application to one that is live-updating with Phoenix LiveView. In part 2, we'll add some interaction with the ability to comment.

Phoenix In Action Has Been Released (And Other Updates)

May 29, 2019 4 minutes read

It has been about 18 months since I announced on this blog that I was working on writing Phoenix in Action for Manning Publications. I’m very excited to announce that it is finished!

I’ve Been Writing a Book—Phoenix in Action!

November 27, 2017 2 minutes read

If you’ve been visiting this site with any sort of regularity, you’ll notice that it’s been quite a long time since my last blog post. Some of you might not care, and others of you might be wondering what is going on. This is an update of sorts.

Introducing ReactPhoenix - Render React.js components in Phoenix views

April 20, 2017 4 minutes read

Check out the package at https://github.com/geolessel/react-phoenix

Using Ecto.Multi To Group Database Operations

January 08, 2017 7 minutes read

Have you ever had a situation in which you had multiple database calls that relied on the success of the previous call? Normally it would be a pain to check each database success/failure status and then continue on in the chain. This can lead to many nested statement...

Live-coding FizzBuzz In Elixir Lightning Talk

November 07, 2016 less than 1 minute read

Last week at a local tech meetup, I presented a quick 6-minute lightning talk on Elixir. In it, I quickly implemented the infamous FizzBuzz programming challenge in Elixir. While doing so, I briefly demonstrated some of the things I like about Elixir such as:

Hosting A Phoenix App In A Subdirectory With Nginx

October 25, 2016 7 minutes read

When I deployed my Fighter Verses project a few weeks ago, I struggled deciding where and how to host it. Would it be hosted with it’s own domain name? Would it be a subdomain of geoffreylessel.com? There were a few reasons I finally decided on hosting it in a subdir...

Announcing My Fighter Verses Landing Page

October 05, 2016 2 minutes read

While most of my free-time development focus has been on Elixir apps that don’t use the web, I’ve been playing a lot with the Phoenix framework as well. I deployed one Phoenix app to production in the spring of this year and it has been running great since then. Howe...

Connecting to Multiple Databases with Ecto

July 26, 2016 3 minutes read

Now that we’ve explored some simple Ecto setups, let’s get a little bit exotic. Did you know that you can set up your application in such a way that you can connect to multiple databases with Ecto? Ecto actually makes it super simple to do so. Let’s take a look.

Using Ecto With an Existing MySQL Database

June 29, 2016 6 minutes read

There was some great feedback from people regarding my post on getting Ecto in your non-Phoenix application (From Zero to Ecto in 10 Minutes). One of the questions I got was about using Ecto with existing databases. While using Ecto with a new database is a great way...