shaundon

Oh lord no, I hate attention! I love tech and new things for sure, but I hate the idea of showing things off. I was so nervous using the Duo on the tube because I hate being noticed, I'm very much a wallflower.

My partner got one at the same time as me (I'm the author of the blog post), and he loves it. I work from home so I'm usually attached to my laptop to meet my 'I need a big screen' itch, but he commutes daily and loves being able to open it up on the tube or bus.

I also massively overthink things. Realistically I should have just said "cool I'll keep it for a year or two and if it's not for me, I won't get another foldable". That's pretty much what my partner said. But unfortunately my brain doesn't work like that (yet!)

I really appreciate you saying that. No hard feelings – this is the internet after all! Have a great rest of your week!

Hi, I'm the author of the post. Not as much as you'd think to be honest! Most of the phones I'm talking about were pre-smartphone and cost about £100. Cheap enough that I was buying them with the wages from my weekend job while I was in school, anyway.

Hello, I'm the author of the blog post. I wouldn't say that I 'crave attention' and it was cruel of you to make that assumption. I didn't even post it to HN, somebody else did.

I suffer from quite intense anxiety, so I went back and forth on this decision for days, and writing my thoughts up on my blog was a way for me to clear my head and 'settle' it internally. I shared it with a few friends who had asked about the decision, and then it ended up on here.

I write on https://codakuma.com.

I wouldn't say I'm a prolific blogger; maybe 4-5 posts per year, but it's nice to have a space to post any thoughts I have.

That looks fantastic, thanks for sharing!

Ah sorry, I should have clarified in my original message. The page I linked to is our public marketing site, which is a static site built with Next. The Phoenix application is the product that the site is talking about (Duffel Links).

I wasn't personally involved in making this decision, I was brought onto the project after it was taken, but there was a perception that we'd be faster if we did everything as a full-stack application. In fairness, we did deliver what we set out to do so it was a success, even if there were some rough edges to deal with.

Also bear in mind that I'm only covering my front-end perspective on this. I think the back-end developers involved on the project found it much easier to work with as they were already experienced with Elixir and Phoenix. For them, a tightly-coupled front and back end meant that they could change the way things worked and it was straightforward to update a few functions in Elixir and then the HEEX template, as opposed to a decoupled setup where we'd probably have been communicating using a JSON API and changes would have had more of a barrier to adopt.

I've been using Elixir with Phoenix and Liveview at my job for the past three months as part of a small team building a non-trivial web app (https://duffel.com/links). I'm mostly a front-end developer and was brought in to handle the UX side. Prior to this project I've spent the last 5+ years in the React world.

I found a lot of what the author says to be true. I'm used to the nightmare that is managing front-end dependencies, and it was refreshing to use something so 'batteries included' that comes with most of what I need.

It took me a while to get my head around the Phoenix + Liveview way of doing things, but when my mental model clicked into place and I stopped trying to do things the React way I became a lot more productive. When I had an autocomplete updating live as the user typed all going over the websocket without me writing any JS, it felt magical.

However I definitely found a lot of sharp edges that the author doesn't mention. We struggled a lot with any non-trivial UX, for example with the autosuggest mentioned above I had to add a lot of JS to handle things like being able to use the keyboard's arrow keys to select options. Whenever I jumped into the JS world it often felt like I was fighting against Phoenix, and had to resort to using 'phx-ignore' a lot. It was frustrating to continually struggle to do things I knew how to do easily in a pure JS environment.

Another area I struggled a lot is Elixir's syntax. To me, it feels like there are too many operators. The author touches upon it towards the end when they mention things like '\\' for default arguments, '<>' for joining strings and '++' for joining lists. It's a lot to wrap your head around at times.

Some of the fault for this lies with me; we were working to a tight deadline so I didn't have time to dedicate to learning Elixir, Phoenix and Liveview from first principles, I just jumped in out of necessity. Had I spent more time on the foundations first I may have been able to avoid some of these pitfalls, but I do think it illustrates that like many 'do everything' frameworks, there's a steep learning curve to doing non-trivial things. It's a powerful tool and I'm optimistic about its future, but I'm undecided if I'd choose it for a future project that has significant front-end requirements at this stage.

Wow I had no idea this exists! Thanks for sharing

Thanks for the feedback! I've actually never heard of The Swift Life, I was a casual fan for a long time but I only really became a huge fan around the time Lover was released.

You're right about Android (and fwiw this app is 100% SwiftUI). I would love to make one but I don't know if I have the time and ability to make an Android app that I'd be proud putting my name on. I am considering making a web version though. I'd also love to add support for Apple Music, but their API doesn't allow third party apps to delete songs from playlists.

I blogged about how it came to be on my website: https://codakuma.com/look-what-you-made-me-do

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