This Week in Elixir and Erlang #17

The wait is finally over!

The long-anticipated episode of Thinking Elixir Podcast with José Valim revealing Project Nx aired yesterday, and I cannot be more excited. In the previous issue, I hinted at some of the rumors and Easter eggs suggesting that Nx will have to do with high-speed number crunching. Indeed, Nx stands for Numerical Elixir. It is a brand new library, together with macro extensions to the language (numerical definitions), that will make possible the writing of performant tensor (multidimensional array) operations on millions of data points. All that has been achieved with as little copying of data as possible. Those of the readers who have worked with machine learning can think of this as Elixir's NumPy - a foundational Python library and a DSL that are the core of most of what makes the Python ecosystem so well-suited at solving ML problems.

I will leave the rest to José to tell about. In my view, he did an amazing job explaining the complexity of the ML domain in a non-ML-specific podcast. Kudos to him and Sean Moriarity for bringing this great addition to the Elixir ecosystem after only about a couple months of work on it!

As I posted on Twitter, once Nx gets out, we can start thinking about porting some of the knowledge over form the Python community. Elixir will need an easy-to-play-with data frame library (like Pandas) and a basic batteries-included toolkit of foundational ML algorithms (like scikit-learn). Anybody interested in bringing those to life? Ping me. I am willing to share my experience working with both.

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Announcements

Elixir Community Voices

Podcasts

Articles

Social messaging with Elixir at Community

A case study of how Elixir is being used at Community.

José Valimelixir-lang.github.com

Towards Maintainable Elixir: The Development Process

In part one of a mini-series, Elixir in Action author and full-time VBT Elixir mentor Saša Jurić presents Very Big Things approach to building a maintainable Elixir codebase.

Saša JurićVery Big Things

Visual scraping with Elixir and Crawly, or how to get data without programming.

In one of my previous articles, we discussed why you might want to scrape data from the Internet. We have shown how to extract data from multiple websites to organize a price monitoring solution for…

Oleg TarasenkoMedium

My Journey Building a Multiplayer Board Game

Top 3 Tough Elixir Fights |Debugging in Production | 2020

I have been traveling with Elixir for 5 years where I saw many curved roads in my journey to be a slower learner. Then after I started drifting the curves and of course I met with many accidents. I’m…

Blackodeblackode

Crafting Beautiful Emails in Elixir Using MJML

Compile MJML->HTML->EEx using a Rust NIF and send your Phx.Gen.Auth notifications via Swoosh

My.Thoughts v1

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