Category Archives: Elixir

My Year in: Software Development

The year of 2018 has been a wild ride for me. It started at EmCasa.com, the startup I described a year ago. We were in the process of putting out a successful MVP, engaging clients, becoming accelerated by Harvard University and closing out an excellent seed round with important investors. All this in just a few months.

Very quickly my job morphed from do-it-all (think product and CTO duties, plus co-founder responsibilities) to team-building. This was a highlight as I was lucky to bring in great people like Gabriela Seabra, Nathan Queija and Rodrigo Nonose, each respectively owning mobile, web frontend and backend. On the design side, Plau.co did great work.

For the first time I felt fully ready to create a digital company in style. The Elixir-React stack worked beautifully, we rolled out features fast and the development team became a cohesive unit very quickly.

Towards the middle of the year, as the company reached 14 people, it had become clear to me that there wasn’t a good cultural fit among the founders. It was one of those very painful decisions but ultimately not difficult to make when visions don’t intersect well enough: we parted ways amicably at the end of July and I went looking for a new job.

That month was tense for me. I knew I had a deadline to basically stop getting paid, my wife was 6 months pregnant with twins and I had nothing lined up as far as work.

I am part of Toptal’s network of freelancers and that was one of the main ways I tried to find the next thing. I found something that really interested me: they had posted an opening to join their Core Team. I applied, passed, and joined the team as a freelancer in August. 

The first few weeks were hard in a sense: I and two other developers coming from Toptal’s talent network had a kind of secondary status, without access to many tools. Luckily our teammates were extremely helpful and welcoming. In a few weeks we became official team members and got access to what the other engineers see.

My team works on Toptal’s public pages, from home to skill pages, basically everything a logged out user can access in the website. 

It’s been a tremendous experience for me so far, as it’s the largest organization I’ve been a part of in technology. Toptal is in fact the largest fully distributed company in the world today. As such, I work with people from all over the world, and that’s the part I like best. To do it from home is the cherry on the cake as my children are very young and being close to the family is priceless at this moment.

At my team I’ve experienced the most well-developed set of processes I’ve ever come across. The firm has reached a level of maturity that allows for very well written task tickets, a proper retrospective at the end of each sprint, interesting strategic discussions among executives, and work that has large-scale, immediate impact. On the other hand, I am very far from top strategic decisions and information, and this feels weird to me having run my own company for so many years.

To a very large extent, this was the year when, for me, technical concerns became secondary to human concerns. Sure, if you’re starting a product alongside just one other person, what tech stack exactly to choose is of paramount importance. In a team of 200 that’s much less important, as each person can focus on a narrower part of the work, and the human interactions can catalyze or hinder progress.

Thus, I gave myself the chance of observing all the teams in the organization: dialogs, processes and rituals. Whatever was visible to me, I tried to learn from. It wasn’t long before I got the opportunity to onboard newcomers, help interview candidates, conduct daily standups and interface with other companies. That’s not to say I didn’t study programming this year: I continued my deep-dive into the Elixir codebase, studied GraphQL, some more Elm, algorithms, some Python and a little bit of Natural Language Processing.

It’s much easier to paste some code or links to a framework and illustrate what goes on as a programmer. Human interactions seem to me much harder to communicate. A book that does a great job of explaining management applied to software is The Manager’s Path, by Camille Fournier. I read it this year and it very neatly sums up many things we learn the hard way, plus many others I simply did not know.

So this year was one in which I started out as CTO and ended-up as an individual contributor. But each experience has taught me a lot about management and leadership, which will be my way forward in technology.

 

My Year in: Software Development

2017 ends for me, at least in terms of software development, on a much higher note than it started.

From January till October I worked on a financial startup through Toptal. I was part of a team of between 5 and 15 people over the period, and my duties were far more restricted than what I’m used to: mostly markup and styling.

I did the work inside Ember but never warmed to the framework. I’m sure it was not because of technical matters per se, rather mostly because I perceived the framework as not picking up traction, therefore not deserving of much investment. It was hard to flow with it since auto-reloads were quite slow and the style of getting and setting values always felt strange to me.

There’s a lot I learned in this project in terms of organizing teams and the main lesson was: if you hire remote team members, embrace that fact full-heartedly. This is not to say that you either do it remotely or locally, but if you have even one team member that is working remotely, you should do everything as if the whole team was remote, otherwise the interactions will break down fast. I’d go further and say that dev teams should work as if remotely even if the team is local, persisting all relevant decisions in writing, avoiding one-to-one communication in favor of groups to save on recommunication and following the basic protocols of remote collaboration.

All the while, I kept spending some time on Elixir, and was always happy doing so even though the language has all but become hugely popular thus far.

Another significant change in my process was my move from Atom to Vim. Yes, the entry barrier is significant, and a bit more so since I use the Colemak keyboard layout, but I am very glad I did it. After a while you’re much more productive in Vim, and it’s a more direct connection between thought and writing. It took about 3 months for me to feel as productive in Vim as I had been in Atom.

Sometime in the middle of the year, a couple of fellows got in touch about starting a company in the real estate sector. After much talk we decided to join forces and we started EmCasa.com.

At EmCasa.com I was free to choose the stack for a greenfield project, and so I chose Postgres, Elixir/Phoenix and React for the web client. Postgres is the dependable relational database, with (I trust) more native support for geolocation, so I didn’t hesitate there. Elixir and Phoenix wasn’t much more of a difficult decision either: I trusted the language entirely, felt the tools are at a very reasonable point, enjoy using it a lot, and thought we could attract good developers to use it. So far it’s worked out that way, and as I get ready to hand over most of the Elixir side to a new team member, we talked to a number of pretty great developers that are fond of the language and excellent at it.

Finally, the React decision was a bit more difficult, and even though I consider myself a frontend developer, has been more fraught with difficulties. It’s hard to say I’d choose React again. I probably would, but I really don’t know if we’d been doing better with Vue.js or maybe even Elm.

EmCasa needs a lot of good SEO, so it needs server-side-rendering and very controllable html headers. It took me a while to sift through a few of the available possibilities, that being the main con of polylyths. Finally I made progress using Next.js, which has been a pleasure to use. I ended up throwing out Redux and I haven’t regretted it. I think Next.js has a good path ahead of itself.

We have a long list of ideas to implement at EmCasa, our backlog is public, and so are our backend and our frontend. If you’re reading this and would like to chat with us about joining the team, check out www.emcasa.com/jobs or write me at gustavo.saiani [at] emcasa.com.

Notes on deploying Webpack in a Phoenix application on Heroku

As of today, there’s no Heroku buildpack specifically built for deploying Phoenix and Webpack. Having found no consolidated place to learn how to do it, here’s what I did.

First, make webpack run in your local environment. This link explains it well.

Make sure to comment out /priv/static in your .gitignore file.

If you haven’t, add the following buildpacks to your heroku deploy.

# Set the buildpack for your Heroku app
heroku buildpacks:set https://github.com/gjaldon/phoenix-static-buildpack

# Add this buildpack after the Elixir buildpack
heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir

Add a file called compileto the root folder of your app, and add the call to webpack:

ENV=production node_modules/.bin/webpack

Note that ENV=production is optional and should relate to your webpack configuration.

Voilà.

Monitoring Phoenix

For the past month or so, I’ve looked at Elixir and Phoenix with interest. Phoenix is a young framework, still in beta, so tools are only starting to appear.

Michael Schäfermeyer has posted on Medium about monitoring in Phoenix, a welcome addition.

Here’s wishing for a quick port of Slim or Jade into Elixir.