Alex Loukissas

Docs will be replaced by well-crafted custom GPTs by this time next year. About time!

Hey @elixir-lang.org folks: what are some of the best system prompts or cursor rules you’re using on the daily?

Claude 3.7 is 🔥 But I still love how fast Gemini Flash is. An o3 is a workhorse. Isn’t it great we have such epic choices?

Elixir I love you, but you’re bringing me down. New chapter.

Gemini 2.0 Flash is really good (and fast!). It’s now my current default in Cursor.

We have been overwhelmingly impressed by getunblocked.com. It essentially renders code documentation irrelevant. Our latest hires got onboarded insanely easily to our code base.

everything is fine

Oban is too good of a tool to be limited to be used only from elixir apps. I wonder what would be the lift for being able to use it as a lightweight replacement for Temporal (which is polyglot)

The more I use GenAI coding tools, the more I am convinced keeping to "traditional" software engineering practices is what works most productive here. As in 10x more productive. E.g. - Small changes - Test that the change works before moving on - (unit) tests wherever you can

I’m not sad that stackoverflow is dying because of LLMs. It walked so we could run.

Remember onavo? Good, old American spyware.

Not all fast software is great but all great software is fast

Zero discussion about Explode on my feed. If I weren’t on Twitter, I would have missed the boldest app launch of the year. Who do I need to follow?

The explode app and launch is a masterclass. Nikita has done it again.

I have been watching the devastation in LA from Greece and I cannot start to comprehend the vastness of destruction

“A moment on your lips, the rest of your life on your hips”. Applies for ice cream but also for LLM-generated code. Code is a liability you must live with and support for months and years after it’s written. Just because you can commit 1000s LoC in a day, you probably shouldn’t.

What a devastating week for LA.

I am so itching to play with Zero. Knowing Aaron, this is probably gonna be epic local-first infra. What to build?! zero.rocicorp.dev/docs/introdu...

New Year, great questions to ask yourself stephango.com/40-questions

Woke up to crazy photos and videos from back in LA. Massive fire, our house already used for friends being evacuated.

The unfair advantage of building with mainstream tech like React is that the LLMs have a ton more training data on them. So you can build + iterate faster. Languages don't matter, products do.

Two marathons. Two solo trips with my boy to Greece. Second app launched with the team. Pretty fucking good year.

If you take all the time it takes to configure nvim, calculate how much you make as a developer and boom! You have enough money to buy a new MBP that can run cursor that works epic ootb and go on with your life.

good day

Great small QOL I've discovered with golang: you can click and run a specific unit test in cursor/vscode.

I wish elixir could check all these missing boxes: - supported by a massive tech co (that’s the big one) - large ecosystem - great for teams (eventually when types are in and everyone’s using them by default)

travel buddy extraordinaire

If your wife gets to the airport with bag(s) to check, I have a very good divorce lawyer for you.

First time checking a bag for a flight in years (gifts). I remember why I always fly with carry on only 😅

As a professional developer, your #1 goal should be to make money on the internet. If it’s not, Jan 1st is coming up, time for reflections :)

react is good, actually

My big commitment for 2025 is to finally learn #golang. It has won as the de facto language for building backend stuff. It is insanely fast, scalable, strongly typed, has a rich ecosystem, and runs as a single binary. Sign me up!

Same benchmark, even with Jose’s PRs applied, Elixir still gets its ass kicked by golang both in latency and QPS 😭 golang is just such a beast! youtu.be/6EnJjOKFrc0?...

xmas morning hike

As annual perf reviews are here: if your engineers are not using tools like cursor, you can assume they're coasting and don't have agency to be high performers.

First draft is ready! Caveats: - it's running on fly + neon free tier, so prob 💩 - no search - no streams - had to use a JS 🫢 hack to emulate the NextJS <Link preload> (this should exist in Phoenix!) - no optimizations whatsoever liveview-faster.fly.dev

A trait I dislike in engineers is telling you why something won’t work. Instant pass when I’m interviewing someone. You wanna work with optimists.

You may not like it but, some of the most consequential languages and OSS have come out of companies that had deep skin in the game for them to work well: Java, Go, React, Prometheus, k8s, etc.

I’m gonna try to build the equivalent of this in LiveView this weekend. Let’s see how this goes! next-faster.vercel.app

If you have successfully setup @elixir-lang.org otel traces on datadog with linked database monitoring, I really wanna know how you did it.

good day today