Elixir in Action is a great way way to learn the core language, and it’s pretty up-to-date with its latest edition. Elixir as a language has been declared feature-complete, so it doesn’t change that much anyway (the major libraries are a different story).

If you wanted a book to walk you through LiveView after that, I can recommend Programming Phoenix LiveView. The book is currently in “beta”, with the final version expected in a month, so it’s very up-to-date. We have a book club at work and just finished it this past week. It does a good job of showing how to make live-updating CRUD pages along with building a pentominoes puzzle game that’s rendered with SVG. You build up the project chapter-to-chapter and have a pretty cool little app at the end.

As long as you don’t need offline support, then a monolith webapp seems like a perfect use for LiveView, especially for a solo dev!

Are you wanting a general overview of Elixir and Phoenix, or do you want to jump into the most modern part of Phoenix, LiveView? I’m an Elixir developer, so I could help direct you to materials and answer questions if you’d like.

I used to feel this way. Over the course of building out 2 calendar systems in my career (so far) and having to learn the intricacies of date and time-related data types and how they interact with time zones, I don’t have much disdain for time zones. I’d suggest for anyone who feels the same way as this meme read So You Want To Abolish Time Zones.

Also, programmers tend to get frustrated with time zones when they run into bugs around time zone conversion. This is almost always due to the code being written in a way that disregards the existence of times zones until it’s needed and then tacks on the time zone handling as an afterthought.

If any code that deals with time takes the full complexities of time zones into account from the get-go (which isn’t that hard to do), then it’s pretty straightforward to manage.

This is why many languages have errors and warnings as separate things. Errors for things that for sure prevent the program from working, and warnings for things that are probably wrong but don’t prevent things from working. If you have a setting to then treat warnings as errors (like for CI checks), then you get all the guarantees and none of the frustration.

If you have a common folder that you clone projects to (like OP’s ~/coding), then that checkbox lets you trust that whole folder easily when this pop up comes up.

If anyone wants a really deep dive into the diamond industry, a recent episode of Search Engine (podcast by PJ Vogt, for anyone familiar with Reply All) is all about this: https://pjvogt.substack.com/p/why-are-we-still-buying-diamonds

It’s a fantastic episode.