Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6

Chapter 19A More Complex Example

When I first used Elixir, I struggled with how to organize my applications. When should I use servers? How do supervisors fit in? Even basic questions such as “how many applications should I write?” made me nervous.

Frankly, I’m still thinking about these questions, three years later, in the same way I’m still thinking about object-oriented system design after 30 years of doing it. But, on the Elixir front, I have come up with an approach that helps me think through these issues.

It isn’t rocket science. I just ask myself these five questions:

• What is the environment and what are its constraints?
• What are the obvious focal points?
• What are the runtime characteristics?
• What do I protect from errors?
• How do I get ...