Learn Elixir and Phoenix by Building Things Over at Alchemist Camp

Nov 25, 2019

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In this episode of Running in Production, Mark guides us through how he builds and deploys his video and article driven learning platform called Alchemist Camp. The site gets about 12,000+ visitors a month and it’s all hosted on a single $10 / month DigitalOcean server.

One takeaway is that you can be quite productive as a solo developer but the bar is constantly being raised for what developers need to learn. For example, at one point we talked about the new SCA workflows with Stripe since he collects payments for subscriptions.

Topics Include

1:53 – What type of content does Alchemist Camp have?
3:41 – The whole platform was developed by Mark
4:12 – Motivation for using Elixir and Phoenix
5:17 – Would you use Phoenix again if you rewrote your app today?
6:52 – Finding a balance between productivity and ease of maintenance
7:51 – Alchemist Camp is a monolithic application but uses it Phoenix contexts
9:07 – The app has roughly 10,000+ lines of Elixir code across 240+ Elixir modules
10:02 – Monolithic apps work very well in a number of different use cases
10:42 – Server rendered templates with sprinkles of JavaScript
11:06 – There’s an API component but it’s for a public subscriber API to download videos
12:04 – The site is very speedy from an end user’s POV even without Turbolinks
12:24 – Waiting a bit longer before trying out Live View
12:48 – Pretty severe RSI limited development to 10 hours a week for a while
14:20 – PostgreSQL is the database of choice
14:34 – nginx is being used, primarily for handling Let’s Encrypt certificates
15:36 – nginx is also used to serve static files and deal with compression
16:29 – Docker is not being used in development, but it’s part of the deploy process
16:40 – Going over previous ways the app was deployed with distillery and edeliver
18:19 – Going over the current deployment method which still uses edeliver
18:25 – GitLab CI / CD helps push code to production with Docker and edeliver
19:05 – Docker isn’t used in production, processes are managed with systemd
19:34 – The server was just upgraded to run Ubuntu 18.04 LTS
20:34 – Everything (including the database) is running on 1 server on DigitalOcean
21:08 – Render is an interesting Heroku alternative that Mark might use next
22:34 – The server is manually configured but using Ansible is in the works
23:27 – Do everything manually first and then automate afterwards when needed
24:21 – Managed database service vs self hosting your own database
25:18 – Logging events into your own database vs using another service
26:30 – Using DigitalOcean’s built in monitoring dashboard
27:40 – It’s hosted on the $10 / month server with 1 CPU core and 2 GB of memory
29:03 – Using ETS with a custom GenServer for caching certain page responses
30:20 – It held up after many people slammed his site using various benchmark tools
31:28 – One bottleneck was compiling Markdown into HTML on each page load
33:09 – Amazon SES is being used to send transactional emails out
34:21 – Marketing emails are done with Mailchimp but that’s being moved to ConvertKit
36:25 – Using Stripe to handle subscription payments, and PayPal is done manually
37:45 – Barrier of entry for handling payments is going up with things like SCA
38:53 – Logging is old school, just hop on the server and check out the log files
39:12 – Taking advantage of DigitalOcean’s built in alerting system
40:34 – Using Let’s Encrypt for issuing SSL certificates with the Certbot tool
40:49 – DNS records are being hosted on DigitalOcean
41:28 – Getting notified by email if your SSL certificates are expiring soon
42:19 – Handling disasters with daily and weekly automated backups
43:17 – There’s lots of ways to backup a database, use the one that works best for you
44:27 – Database backups are being saved on DO Spaces (S3 compatible object storage)
44:59 – There’s no URL based health checks on the app itself but that may change soon
45:35 – Sometimes you can’t believe your site actually works because you don’t get alerts
46:58 – Best tips? Keep your code and infrastructure simple early on and ship your app
48:18 – Region based discount had a display bug, but developers (as end users) are forgiving
51:23 – You can find Mark @AlchemistCamp on Twitter and check out his new podcast

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Learn Elixir and Phoenix by Building Things Over at Alchemist Camp

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