Alpha Camp and Beyond

Learning Elixir and Phoenix (A URL Shortener)

Kenneth Teh
2 min readJan 8, 2018

Now that I’m done with Alpha Camp (and I’m back from holidays), I finally have time to sit down and write something! So let’s see… I’ll need to work on my Github page to get it somewhat accessible (start with Readmes)… will keep you guys updated on that!

Since Alpha Camp ended, we’ve continued to have bi-weekly AC meetups. This series has been about Elixir and Phoenix. (Elixir looks like Ruby and has the Rails-like Phoenix framework, so it was a relatively low-hanging fruit for an introduction to functional programming).

Built this URL shortener:

A quick look at the app

It was built in a decidedly Rails-y way, and I hacked it together in a short time, so there are some awful practices in there, but it works!

You can try it out here:

As you can see, it’s only a URL Shortener in name….the “shortened” URL is longer than the original. HAHA. But I was using this app to test out the routing in Phoenix.

Followed this guide for deployment:

One gotcha (just like for Rails), after following the instructions, you have to do a heroku run mix ecto.migrate

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Kenneth Teh
Kenneth Teh

Written by Kenneth Teh

Software Engineer primarily working with Rails and Vue.JS... sometimes DevOps and shell stuff too

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