Introducing Phoenix by Example

Teaching has always been a big part of my self identity. Be it teaching at university, Big Nerd Ranch workshops or even my work with local tech meetups.

With my increasing enjoyment of Elixir and Phoenix I’ve been anxious to find a teaching outlet using these technologies. Additionally I want to find a unique spin on whatever I come up with, since there are already lots of great resources for learning Elixir and Phoenix and I don’t want steal anyone’s thunder.

My first result towards this effort is a “hello world” style example app and tutorial called greeter:

Greeter is a “hello world” example app to help introduce the core concepts of the Phoenix Framework written in Elixir.

This tutorial assumes no previous Elixir experience. In fact the first section will help you install and setup Elixir and Phoenix.

By the end of this example, you’ll have created a Phoenix app that can display a custom greeting message with a formatted name.

I’ve published the example repo under the Phoenix by Example organization name. I’ve also nabbed a web domain phoenixbyexample.com and a twitter account @PhoenixExamples.

I’m still not sure how this will work out over time but my plan is to record a few videos to accompany the example project. I would also like to work out some shorter tweet videos with some tips and tricks content.

The next project I’m thinking about would be a link shortener. I suspect I will not do a step-by-step tutorial for that one, but instead lean on code snippets pointing out the big ideas and then more videos.

The only really “bad news” is that I have a new Elixir Phoenix client project starting up so progress on these examples will be a little slower than I expected when I started pulling it together.

Feedback and project ideas very welcome. Let me know what you think.