I’ve been experimenting a bit with Gleam and Elixir lately as part of my search for a new programming language.

One of Gleam’s flagship features is that it can call Elixir code and libraries, but I couldn’t find any examples of how to do that. I wrote a simple example of calling an Elixir library from a Gleam project, based on my beginner’s understanding of the Gleam/Elixir/Erlang ecosystem.

Install dependencies

For this example, I’m using

Highlights

• The writing techniques I planned last month helped me publish faster and focus better.
• I need to find more ways to talk to readers about my book.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Publish two chapters of my book to pre-order readers

• Result: Published “You’re Qualified to Write a Blog Post” and “Good vs. Bad Content Marketing”
• Grade: A

I completed these chapters and sent them to pre-order customers.

One of my goals for the year is to learn a new programming language. It’s been a while since I learned a new language, and I feel like a lot of the languages I know well (Go, Python, C++) are similar to each other, so I want to try getting out of my comfort zone a bit with a language that feels weird to me.

Requirements

Here’s what I’m looking for:

I just finished listening to Simon Willison’s interview on the Software Misadventures podcast. I learned a lot from the interview, so I wrote up my notes.

This is not a summary of the whole interview, just the parts that were new to me or that I’d like to remember.

Who’s Simon Willison?

• One of the co-creators of Django, the most popular web framework for Python.
• One of the most popular indepedent bloggers on Hacker News.
• For the last few years, has focused his blog primarily on AI, especially on applications of AI technology in everyday software development.
• Currently working on an open-source data analysis tool called Datasette.

Plugins as a form of open-source contribution

Original discussion

Highlights

• Why am I making slower progress than I’d like on my book?
• I optimize my Asciidoctor write and preview workflow.
• I’m working on a side project to track Hacker News performance in real-time.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Write a blog post about lessons from Kickstarter

• Result: Published My $6k Advance as a Self-Published Technical Author
• Grade: A

I originally set out to write a guide that focused on Kickstarter, but the more I wrote, the less I felt like Kickstarter was the interesting part. I was more excited about crowdfunding as a path for self-published authors, and Kickstarter is just one way of crowdfunding.