107: Catching Up with Alex Koutmos

We caught up with Alex Koutmos, a co-host on an Elixir podcast, book author, and OpenSource library creator. We talk about some of his well known libraries like PromEx, but then go into some of his potentially lesser known ones like Doctor, Replug, Unplug, and MJML EEx. I'm happy to learn more about MJML EEx, an email formatting library for improved cross-mail client readers! We talk about the Nerves Weather Station book, and his new book project Elixir Patterns that makes heavy use of Livebook. Come enjoy a deeper visit with an Elixir community contributor!

Show Notes online - http://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/107

Elixir Community News

• https://hex.pm/packages/kino – Kino 0.6.2 was released. This includes Alex Koutmos recent work that makes it easy to render a supervision tree in Livebook.
• https://twitter.com/akoutmos/status/1542324451425107968
• https://github.com/livebook-dev/kino/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
• https://twitter.com/akoutmos/status/1542710874586112001 – Another crazy Livebook improvement that Alex teased is a process tracing viewer.
• https://twitter.com/owenbickford/status/1543369745306632192 – Elixir-LS got an update - “Suggest an appropriate module name with the 'defmodule' snippet”
• https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/pull/684 – PR with demonstration video.
• https://github.com/fuelen/ecto_erd/ – Ecto.ERD library generates ERD diagram from your Ecto schemas
• https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/1542165462599057408 – Combined June Elixir announcements
• https://pragprog.com/titles/puphoe/building-table-views-with-phoenix-liveview/ – New book titled “Building Table Views with Phoenix LiveView” by Peter Ullrich.
• https://twitter.com/sasajuric/status/1542859420740239361 – Saša Jurić announced he’s working on Elixir in Action 3rd Edition.
• https://github.com/peburrows/goth/blob/v1.3.0/CHANGELOG.md – Goth library released v1.3.
• https://twitter.com/adamwathan/status/1539752930349293569 – Self-project management tip - "Everything goes smoother when you focus on getting 10% of a project 100% done instead of getting 100% of a project 10% done."

Do you have some Elixir news to share? Tell us at @ThinkingElixir or email at [email protected]

Discussion Resources

• https://hex.pm/users/akoutmos – Published packages that Alex maintains
• https://pragprog.com/titles/passweather/build-a-weather-station-with-elixir-and-nerves/ – Nerves weather Station book
• https://elixirpatterns.dev/ – Elixir Patterns book that I am currently working on with Hugo
• https://eaglemms.com/ – Bootstrapping a business with Elixir and LiveView
• https://akoutmos.com/post/plug-runtime-config – Post about Unplug and Replug
• https://hex.pm/packages/replug
• https://hex.pm/packages/unplug
• https://twitter.com/akoutmos/status/1541078170383835136 – Tweet about rendering supervision trees using Kino and Mermaid in Livebook.
• https://www.whoosh.io/
• https://www.beamrad.io/ – Beam Radio podcast where Alex co-hosts.
• https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/getting_started/
• https://prometheus.io/
• https://github.com/beam-telemetry
• https://www.timescale.com/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TimescaleDB
• https://elixir-radar.com/
• https://github.com/livebook-dev/kino
• https://github.com/akoutmos/doctor – Doctor library for checking documentation coverage
• https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/101 – Interview with Ben Johnson about Litestream
• https://github.com/akoutmos/litestream – Alex's litestream project
• https://github.com/akoutmos/sqlite_scale – Experiment with Ecto Dynamic Repos and SQLite
• https://hex.pm/packages/mjml_eex – MjmlEEx allows you to easily create beautiful looking responsive Emails using the MJML template language, with the ergonomics and safety of a Phoenix template.
• https://github.com/adoptoposs/mjml_nif
• https://mjml.io/ – The MJML website with documentation about email formatting features.
• https://github.com/jdrouet/mrml
• https://hex.pm/packages/prom_ex – PromEx library
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SkVsUdUutE – Alex's Code BEAM talk from last spring if people want to learn more BEAM + Prometheus + Grafana = Observability Heaven

Guest Information

• https://twitter.com/akoutmos – on Twitter
• https://github.com/akoutmos/ – on Github
• https://akoutmos.com/ – Blog
• https://elixirpatterns.dev/ – Elixir Patterns book

Find us online

• Message the show - @ThinkingElixir
• Email the show - [email protected]
• Mark Ericksen - @brainlid
• David Bernheisel - @bernheisel
• Cade Ward - @cadebward