Stephen Ball

@[email protected]
104 Followers
40 Following
105 Posts
Hello! Elixir is my favorite programming language! I'll write code in whatever language is necessary but if it isn't Elixir it isn't a great time. I've been interested since I saw José introduce it at Rocky Mountain Ruby 2012 and worked fulltime in Elixir from 2015-2017. Since joining Tanium in 2017 it's been a lot of NodeJS; some OS level scripting on Windows, *nix, macOS, Solaris, and AIX; and Go.

Since May 2022 I've been able to bring Elixir to my work via Livebook and custom smart cells to communicate with our APIs.

Love of Elixir aside, I've also written more BASH than any one human probably should and find it enjoyable as well.

I live in the USA and my wife and I are parents to three amazing kids.

I love videogames and you can find me playing Rocket League on my PS5 as the organizer of the "Functional Programming is Good" club.

I'm a periodic conference speaker and most recently remotely presented "Livebook smart cells are amazing" at ElixirConf 2022.
Bloghttps://www.strangeleaflet.com
Stephen BallAug 8, 2023
Erlang & Elixir WeeklyAug 7, 2023

Interfacing Elixir with Rust to Improve Performance: Discord's Story

https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/07/rust-elixir-performance-at-scale/

Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/07/rust-elixir-performance-at-scale/

#elixir #programming #rustlang

Interfacing Elixir with Rust to Improve Performance: Discord's Story

When the Discord team hit a hard-limit on BEAM's performance dealing with large data structures, they resorted to interfacing Elixir with Rust to make their system able to scale up to 11 million concurrent users.

InfoQ
Stephen BallAug 3, 2023
James Edward Gray IIJul 26, 2023

I’ve been missing having a blog lately, so here’s a first post for a new mostly Elixir blog called the Programmer’s Stone: https://programmersstone.blog/posts/easier-recursion/

#elixir #blog #recursion #iterators #stream

Easier Recursion

I definitely understand the sentiment behind the L. Peter Deutsch quote, "To iterate is human, to recurse divine." I enjoy an elegant recursive solution as much as other programmers, but lately I've been playing with another style of coding up similar needs that might just be easier and more flexible.

The Programmer's Stone
Stephen BallJul 29, 2023
Erlang & Elixir WeeklyJul 29, 2023

Erlang, the Unix way

http://blog.syncpup.com/posts/erlang-the-unix-way.html

Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/http://blog.syncpup.com/posts/erlang-the-unix-way.html

#erlang #programming #unix

Erlang, the Unix way

When used in anger, OTP is supposed to be started once, and never, hopefully, fall over. This is in the culture of this wonderful language, and that’s why when one uses Erlang in other ways, everything just feels a little off.

Sync’ up! … without getting drained
Stephen BallJul 23, 2023
PeterJul 22, 2023
🚨 New Blog Post Alarm 🚨

Adding libraries is a massive security risk.

They gain FULL access to your configuration, database, and file-system. Here's how they could steal them and how to protect yourself.

Written with help from Paraxial.io and Wojtek Mach ❤️

https://www.peterullrich.com/how-malicious-libraries-can-steal-all-your-application-secrets
Stephen BallJul 23, 2023
Terris LinenbachJul 22, 2023

https://hexdocs.pm/openai_ex/streaming_orderbot.html#setup

A chatbot using gpt3-turbo in Livebook. That’s important because I am using Livebook as my primary IDE these days.

It collects orders for a restaurant. For example, you can type “menu” and it will list the menu. All of this with no code. It passes the Turing test as far as this judge is concerned.

I’m shook.

#chatgpt #livebook

Streaming Orderbot — openai_ex v0.2.1

Stephen BallJul 22, 2023
Machine Learning in Elixir is super fun! I’m only in chapter 1 so I keep running into arcane magical concepts that the book promises to explain later. I am happily and dutifully following along in Livebook and things are happening! In this screenshot I’ve just run a model training loop on a small set of data.
Stephen BallJul 20, 2023

“Throughout this book, you’ll use Livebook—Elixir’s interactive code notebooks—to work with data and train models in an interactive and reproducible way.”

— Machine Learning in Elixir by Sean Moriarity

❤️ That is exactly what I wanted to hear. I’ve previously been translating my Elixir book reads from IEx examples to Livebook. It’s awesome to see Livebook as a first class learning environment.

Stephen BallJul 15, 2023
Erlang & Elixir WeeklyJul 14, 2023

What's new in Livebook 0.10 - Introducing Multi-Session Livebook Apps

https://news.livebook.dev/whats-new-in-livebook-0.10---introducing-multi-session-livebook-apps-3Dbpss

Discussions: https://discu.eu/q/https://news.livebook.dev/whats-new-in-livebook-0.10---introducing-multi-session-livebook-apps-3Dbpss

#elixir #programming

What's new in Livebook 0.10 - Introducing Multi-Session Livebook Apps - Livebook.dev The Livebook Blog

This major update brings many exciting features, with the spotlight being the introduction of multi-session Livebook apps. We’ve also added a presenta

Stephen BallJul 12, 2023
Paraxial.ioJul 12, 2023
Thomas Rodriguez, Finding your dream job with Livebook, SQLite and similarity search

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wlacT72IFU
Thomas Rodriguez, Finding your dream job with Livebook, SQLite and similarity search

YouTube
Stephen BallJul 10, 2023
Maggie TateJul 10, 2023
Woohoo! @sean_moriarity Elixir and Machine Learning! New BeamRadio podcast episode out! https://beamrad.io/54 #MyElixirStatus
Sean Moriarity and Machine Learning

Join the panel for a riveting talk with Sean Moriarity on Elixir and Machine Learning

Beam Radio