The Elixir Year: Month 2 Review
This post is the 2nd entry in The Elixir Year Series.
I'm happy to report that this month turned out to be a lot more fun than the last! I've had a couple breakthroughs, and wrote two separate blog posts going into detail of each:
Sabbatical Time Management - How I've implemented a Learning Management System to keep me on track, while also allowing me to wander.
The $0.30 Coach - Using LLM Agents to generate custom tailored coding challenges for me based on Exercism.org exercises, complete with a test suite, quirky backstories, and more. All for pennies in minutes.
🏃 Reaching the End of Q1
Next month is going to be a sprint to finish a number of things as Q1 draws to a close. My goal was to spend the first 3 months learning the fundamentals of Elixir, and I think I can still meet that goal. Here's what I think is realistic for achieving by end of March:
- Finish reading "Elixir in Action"
- Finish reading "Learn Functional Programming with Elixir"
- Complete 25 Exercism.org Coding Challenges (currently at 17)
- Prepare a peer programming challenge to submit for applying to the Recurse Center!
It feels great to be able to understand most elixir code I come across, and spreading core language learning throughout the entire year makes more sense than trying to grok the entire language in 3 months.
Side Quests
🧰 tools.flaviuspopan.com
I'm a huge fan of Simon Willison as a blogger, technical writer, software engineer, and LLM analyst. I took a page from his book and created a new subdomain to host tools made in collaboration with Claude's Artifact mode. At the moment it's a placeholder as I haven't uploaded any of the tools yet, but it was fun to setup on Github Pages and Cloudflare. I've got a couple nifty HTML pages I made with Claude to teach me about recursion (will upload soon), and I'll likely make a lot more trinkets & toys now that I picked up a $20/mo subscription.
🤖 AI Engineering & Agents
Elixir isn't my only focus for this year; those that know me personally can attest that I'm obsessed with LLMs and AI developments. This month, I picked up a fantastic book called AI Engineering that covers the most evergreen parts of AI applications and patterns. Even though the field changes on a near-daily basis, the book covers the fundamentals without getting caught up on the flavor of the day. It also came out last month, so it's still very fresh. I can hardly put it down.
I also signed up for HuggingFace's AI Agents Course, a multi-month class with thousands of students all learning how to use various agent libraries. It ends on May 1st, and I found it just in time to catch up and follow along for the next section's release. It'll cover the smolagents, LlamaIndex, and LangGraph libraries in depth, with hands on coding challenges, a ranked leaderboard for agent battles, and other goodies, with a completion certificate at the end. 100% free as well. I realize this will likely take some time away from learning Elixir, but I see it as a complimentary skillset that I plan to converge with Elixir at a later date.