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.
Back to the links...
Announcements
I'm glad to hear people getting excited about Nx! Also huge kudos to @sean_moriarity, none of this would have happened without him!
— José Valim (@josevalim) February 9, 2021
Now I have to finish my Lambda Days talk! :D
Our brand refresh was all about taking the things we already excel at and making them the foundations of what we do in the future. Before we announced the 3C's to the team, we asked some of them what consultancy means to us. Learn more at https://t.co/RU8JkIwdj6 pic.twitter.com/0E5lB6Nah7
— Erlang Solutions (@ErlangSolutions) February 8, 2021
"Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir" is now out! You can get the Beta eBook on the @pragprog website:https://t.co/AtU1wscK1B
— Svilen Gospodinov (@svileng) February 4, 2021
More chapters coming soon 📚#myelixirstatus pic.twitter.com/kERKDWGViT
Oban v2.4.0 is out! Centralized job staging (more queues), overhauled cron (smaller package), new indexes (faster unique jobs), and a ton of telemetry improvements.
— Soren (@sorentwo) January 26, 2021
See the CHANGELOG for details: https://t.co/Jv08glvVJs#myelixirstatus #obanbg
Elixir Community Voices
I think Elixir could really help long-running operating system tasks. I would love to see some tools evolve around this. Create a .deb of your Elixir app which installs as a systemd service. Now you have a (for example) encrypted file syncing service across your computers.
— David Bernheisel (@bernheisel) February 7, 2021
PSA for asdf and Elixir users
— David Bernheisel (@bernheisel) February 6, 2021
put this in your .zshrc or .bashrc
export KERL_BUILD_DOCS="yes"
Now when you install Erlang, you'll have helpful docs in iex on erlang functions like you do Elixir functions.
for example `h :https://t.co/TyWPZzGxBE_to_encoding`#myelixirstatus pic.twitter.com/uUqyHVauLF
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