4 ms·

We're in the final stretch of migrating our old node/mongo/REST stack to elixir/postgres/graphql (with Absinthe), and I'm absolutely loving it so far. Elixir is

by pcmonk 9y ago

We're in the final stretch of migrating our old node/mongo/REST stack to elixir/postgres/graphql (with Absinthe), and I'm absolutely loving it so far. Elixir is a great language, and Absinthe is very easy to use, even for a graphql noob like me. Even new/experimental features like absinthe_phoenix and absinthe_ecto have been virtually flawless. I guess the real test will be when we deploy it to production on Tuesday!

abrookewood 9y ago
Why did you decide on migrating so many parts at the same time? Curious what pushed you to make the change.
- pcmonk 9y ago
  Basically, our purpose for the API changed. The old stack was created first as an MVP, then evolved a lot over time. We decided to make our API useful not just for our front end, but also for developers. The mongo "schema" was a mess, and our data actually has quite a lot of relations, so postgres was an obvious choice. That was probably the most important change. None of our current engineers have much experience in node (the one who built the api originally no longer works for the company), and we all dislike it as a language. The code itself was a mess, and would need to be rewritten even just to switch to postgres. Ideally, we wanted a language that was typed, functional, and good for web programming. We built small prototypes in Nim, Rust, and Elixir, and Elixir just ran away with it, even though its typing is less than ideal. The graphql choice (and the direct impetus for the rewrite) was basically because we decided to make our api useful not only for our front end, but also for our users to interact with directly from their code. For this to be reasonable, the endpoints needed to be completely restructured, and we needed to expose a lot more of our database. It seemed pretty clear that having a single graphql endpoint to expose all our data would buy us a lot in terms of being developer-friendly. Even just exploring in GraphiQL is so much better than reading docs for a REST API. Overall, it's taken about two months of my time plus the last couple of weeks of one other engineer's time to recreate it all and migrate the data.
  - dom96 9y ago
    Can you expand on what made you choose Elixir over Nim?

by pcmonk 9y ago

abrookewood 9y ago

Why did you decide on migrating so many parts at the same time? Curious what pushed you to make the change.

pcmonk 9y ago
Basically, our purpose for the API changed. The old stack was created first as an MVP, then evolved a lot over time. We decided to make our API useful not just for our front end, but also for developers. The mongo "schema" was a mess, and our data actually has quite a lot of relations, so postgres was an obvious choice. That was probably the most important change. None of our current engineers have much experience in node (the one who built the api originally no longer works for the company), and we all dislike it as a language. The code itself was a mess, and would need to be rewritten even just to switch to postgres. Ideally, we wanted a language that was typed, functional, and good for web programming. We built small prototypes in Nim, Rust, and Elixir, and Elixir just ran away with it, even though its typing is less than ideal. The graphql choice (and the direct impetus for the rewrite) was basically because we decided to make our api useful not only for our front end, but also for our users to interact with directly from their code. For this to be reasonable, the endpoints needed to be completely restructured, and we needed to expose a lot more of our database. It seemed pretty clear that having a single graphql endpoint to expose all our data would buy us a lot in terms of being developer-friendly. Even just exploring in GraphiQL is so much better than reading docs for a REST API. Overall, it's taken about two months of my time plus the last couple of weeks of one other engineer's time to recreate it all and migrate the data.
- dom96 9y ago
  Can you expand on what made you choose Elixir over Nim?