With the holidays approaching, the AppSignal team is taking a mini winter break from publishing Elixir posts. We hope to bring you a lot more of them in 2023. 🍵 ❄️

In the meantime, let's look at the top 5 most liked Elixir blog posts from 2022!

Functional Programming in Elixir with Witchcraft

While Elixir is a functional programming language, it is different from most of the other popular functional languages like Haskell, Scala, OCaml, and F#.

In this article, I want to introduce you to a library called Witchcraft and show how you can use it to emulate Haskell-style programming in Elixir.

Algebraic Data Types in Elixir

Elixir is a dynamically-typed language. Types in Elixir are checked when a program runs, not when it compiles. If they don’t match up, an exception is thrown.

In statically-typed languages, types are checked during compile time. This can help us write code that is correct, understandable, and refactorable.

In this article, we'll cover Dialyzer, ADTs, and how you can solve the problem of illegal states by using them together.

A Guide to Event-Driven Architecture in Elixir

In this post, we will explore how event-driven architecture can make your app more responsive for users and decouple your modules for a better developer experience.

We will also look at several methods of implementing event-driven architecture with Elixir. Elixir is particularly good for this because of the advanced and concise message-passing APIs that it offers and BEAM's outstanding support for concurrency.

Livebook for Elixir: Just What the Docs Ordered

While initially conceived as a tool for data exploration (much like Jupyter for Python), Livebook has deservedly become a sensation in the Elixir community.

It has been fantastic to see all the wonderful ways teams are leveraging Livebook for a range of different use cases. We have seen Livebooks being used to:

• Create interactive documentation for libraries.
• Build onboarding material and guides.
• Audit and explore potential dependencies in your app.

How to Write a Functor in Elixir

In this post, I will introduce you to a concept from functional programming called a functor. We’ll make a Functor protocol with a function called fmap that will aspire to be a better version of Enum.map.

AFK Time!

We hope you've learned something new while reading our blog this year. We know we have! In 2023, our team will continue working hard to publish new blog posts in our efforts to spread knowledge across the Elixir community.

Wherever you are in the world, we hope you enjoy a happy and healthy end of year. We hope that 2023 will be an amazing year for you, with no bugs and packed with events and adventures that are almost as sweet as a stroopwafel.