notes - Elixir/Ruby Mashup

source/talks/the-polyglot-in-the-code-an-elixir-ruby-mashup/notes/aeon-notes.md

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+author: Anton Stroganov (@aeon)
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+## The Polyglot in the Code - An Elixir/Ruby Mashup
+
+Johnny Winn, hashrocket, [@johnny_rugger](http://twitter.com/johnny_rugger)
+
+- has seven kids, homeschooled all of them... so a lot of experience figuring out teaching methodologies...
+- why bring this up?
+- challenge us to spark our curiousity, we tend to get expertise in a field and stay in the comfort zone after that
+
+- learning process...
+	- throwing things together without knowing what you are doing still teaches you things
+	- knowledge is constructed not acquired...
+	- you don't just read a book and wake up the next day knowing ruby, you have to build up the knowledge by doing things
+
+- scaffolding theory of language acquisition:
+	- if you give students something that they already know alongside new material, they progress faster 
+
+- so, use ruby to scaffold around another language to make learning it easier.
+
+- intro to elixir, created by Jose Vallim...
+	- use pattern matching
+	- use guard clauses
+	- functions have to always be in modules
+	- mix lets you configure elixir environment 
+	- dynamo - sinatra-like web framework for elixir
+	- ecto - handles database interactions, pretty different from activerecord/sql approach in modeling the data
+- what is missing?
+	- spec/BDD testing... elixir has xunit, but that's not enough
+	- data migrations...
+- well, why not use ruby?
+	- just create an elixir project
+	- then create a Gemfile
+	- testing:
+		- disable default servers for cucumber, since we want to test elixir code that's running with mix server
+		- add a task to invoke cucumber from `mix` and it works.
+		- configure db config in cucumber.rb and establish connection so that you can connect to test db from tests
+	- data migrations
+		- add builder and activerecord to your gemfile...
+		- add a Rakefile that will require the migrations
+		- create db namespace and run migration tasks in Rakefile
+		- and yep, rake db:migrate works. pretty much same as setting up "standalone migrations" gem really.
+- back to elixir...
+	- set up db Repo object, Model object, and Query objects.
+	- set up router to handle urls we are interested in
+	- set up the template to render - uses list comprehension in the template
+- run the tests again, and... it works.
+
+- So now what?
+	- use existing tools to fill gaps in the new toolkits if we need to
+	- learn things by using your existing knowledge and tools as starting point