People commented so nicely on my first build tool FBU that I decided to push it to the Elixir package manager Hex.pm. I renamed it, though, since people pointed out that it could be used to build anything, not just the front end. So now it’s called (still unimaginatively) MBU: Mix Build Utilities.
You can find it at hex.pm/packages/mbu and the docs are in Hexdocs.
EDIT 2017-04-04: I have since renamed the project to MBU: Mix Build Utilities and published it on Hex.pm: hex.pm/packages/mbu. I have edited the links and code examples in this post to reflect that.
tl;dr I wrote my own build tool using Elixir’s Mix: Nicd/mbu.
It’s no secret that I somewhat dislike the state of modern web development. JavaScript is its own terrible world, but one of the sad parts of it is the ecosystem and tooling around it. There’s a lot of innovation and hard work going on in very many fragmented projects, resulting in reimplementations of already solved problems and a ton of half working, alpha quality, 0.x versioned packages with unknown support status. With these packages, you start your project by building an elaborate house of cards that is the build system. And you dread the day when you need to touch it again.
This is a project that I’ve been working on for a month or so on my free time (of which there really isn’t too much). I started it on my company’s 12 hour hackfest, where I didn’t get anything worth showing done (it was all backend stuff), but now it’s ready to be published. *drumroll* So, it’s time for the reveal:
What better way to spend a slow weekend than by writing another blog engine? Plenty, actually, but that’s what I did anyway. The result of this work: Mebe! This blog is now powered by a wonderful mix of Elixir and Phoenix. It has all the features that Laine had, with the addition of an actually working Disqus comment system. It’s also search engine indexable, which I thought I didn’t care about, until I didn’t have it anymore. Not that I’m aiming for tons of visitors, but writing about some tech problem I have fixed is kind of pointless if no one can find the post by googling for it.
I had some free time this weekend, so I decided to pick up on an old piece of code I wrote back when I started learning Elixir. It’s a URI parser I called Nurina (the word nurina is Finnish and means grumbling or complaining — it sounded funny and it contains the word URI). It’s not really a well put together piece of code but more of a learning excercise. I also decided to avoid using regular expressions entirely and instead used pattern matching to parse the whole URI — an additional challenge.