92: Derrick Reimer - Building an SPA with Elm, Phoenix and GraphQL

Topics include:

• Why Derrick chose to build Level as an SPA
• Choosing Elm over React or Vue
• How Elm is sort of like a language and framework combined
• Moving to Phoenix from Rails
• Why getting abstractions right feels easier in a functional language
• How "contexts" help you organize your Phoenix code
• The benefits of GraphQL over REST
• What it looks like to implement GraphQL on the server
• Avoiding n+1 queries with GraphQL

Sponsors:

• Rollbar, sign up at https://rollbar.com/fullstackradio to try their Bootstrap Plan free for 90 days
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Links:

• Level
• Level live-coding screencasts on YouTube
• Elm, the functional programming language Derrick is using on the frontend
• An Introduction to Elm, the official tutorial
• The Elm Architecture
• Elixir, the functional programming language Derrick is using on the backend
• Phoenix, the Elixir framework
• Contexts in Phoenix
• GraphQL
• Absinthe, GraphQL implementation for Elixir

Episode source