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I’ve been following live-view and elixir (and LiveBook as a result) and the people working on it are incredible! Inspired me to start learning elixir on the sid

I’ve been following live-view and elixir (and LiveBook as a result) and the people working on it are incredible! Inspired me to start learning elixir on the side a few weeks ago after admiring from afar. Elixir is quirky and the functional aspects especially take getting used to (eg the learning guides say you should rarely write for loops), but the runtime and some of these amazing tools really show the potential. I don’t know if I’ll ever use it professionally (I hope so, honestly) but I think I’ll learn something that’ll make me better regardless. LiveView has such a unique and refreshing take on web-dev (I say having never written any significant amount of HTML), that seems to make it behave much more like a local application. And LiveBook builds on that to be a next-gen alternative to Jupiter notebooks. I can totally imagine live book expanding into a more general purpose interactive playground type tool.. good for internal tools and dashboard and development experiments… almost a WebUI alternative to a REPL. I feel like all that’s missing is being able to inject/attach to an existing VM.

afhammad 4y ago
> almost a WebUI alternative to a REPL That's basically how my team have been increasingly using it. Simply connect Livebook to a locally running Phoenix project and you have a Livebook REPL into your server. When you're dealing with complex data, pulling from different sources and have to build up a bunch of context before you iterate on a function it's super useful to be able to break up that code into chunks, take form inputs[0] along the way and document any quirks. We keep a bunch of livebooks committed in the repo to help debug and iterate on the more complex parts of our codebase. 0: https://hexdocs.pm/kino/Kino.html https://hexdocs.pm/kino/Kino.html
- thomasfortes 4y ago
  A couple weeks ago a client asked for some stats that came out of the blue (the data was collected, but they weren't exposed at the dashboard), his app was at fly.io, I've set up a wireguard tunnel to connect a livebook to the app and we went in a couple hours exploration of all the data that wasn't exposed at the dashboard, I took a ton of notes and the client spent a lot of time gushing about how he never had that much access to the underlying data in projects before without having to wait at least a couple weeks, to be able to work with live data almost instantaneously is a plus that I don't know if I'm able to give up at this point. It was a new client and a short project but since then they closed a couple years contract to a new project, Livebook is indeed magic.
zusoomro 4y ago
> I feel like all that’s missing is being able to inject/attach to an existing VM. If you mean connecting to a running node, that’s already possible! Here’s an example on fly.io’s infra: https://fly.io/docs/elixir/advanced-guides/connect-livebook-to-your-app/ https://fly.io/docs/elixir/advanced-guides/connect-livebook-...

afhammad 4y ago

> almost a WebUI alternative to a REPL That's basically how my team have been increasingly using it. Simply connect Livebook to a locally running Phoenix project and you have a Livebook REPL into your server. When you're dealing with complex data, pulling from different sources and have to build up a bunch of context before you iterate on a function it's super useful to be able to break up that code into chunks, take form inputs[0] along the way and document any quirks. We keep a bunch of livebooks committed in the repo to help debug and iterate on the more complex parts of our codebase. 0: https://hexdocs.pm/kino/Kino.html https://hexdocs.pm/kino/Kino.html

thomasfortes 4y ago
A couple weeks ago a client asked for some stats that came out of the blue (the data was collected, but they weren't exposed at the dashboard), his app was at fly.io, I've set up a wireguard tunnel to connect a livebook to the app and we went in a couple hours exploration of all the data that wasn't exposed at the dashboard, I took a ton of notes and the client spent a lot of time gushing about how he never had that much access to the underlying data in projects before without having to wait at least a couple weeks, to be able to work with live data almost instantaneously is a plus that I don't know if I'm able to give up at this point. It was a new client and a short project but since then they closed a couple years contract to a new project, Livebook is indeed magic.

zusoomro 4y ago

> I feel like all that’s missing is being able to inject/attach to an existing VM. If you mean connecting to a running node, that’s already possible! Here’s an example on fly.io’s infra: https://fly.io/docs/elixir/advanced-guides/connect-livebook-to-your-app/ https://fly.io/docs/elixir/advanced-guides/connect-livebook-...