– Adam is the sole developer but he has a friend who helps him market the service

– The Slack bot asks you a number of questions, such as your music preference

– The public site uses Phoenix and the bot is written in Elixir

– What made Elixir a perfect fit for this application?

– Handling concurrency through tasks using Elixir’s standard library

– Several thousand questions are answered per day

– It’s all done through Slack webhooks using the Elixir-Slack library

– Slack bots are easy to start using but it gets complicated pretty quickly

– Unix timestamps vs Gregorian seconds

– The Elixir forums and Slack channel are great resources to get Elixir help

– Are you using the latest version of Phoenix? Not yet

– Phoenix is nice because it gently guides you into creating well structured apps

– The stripity_stripe library is used to handle Stripe payments

– The awesome-elixir repo on GitHub has a great list of libraries

– It was hard to find a good well maintained authentication library for Elixir

– The Elixir-Slack library was really helpful for Adam’s project

– Everything is stored in a PostgreSQL database

– Gigalixir is used for hosting and it’s well optimized for running Elixir in production

– Gigalixir has really good support

– Gigalixir’s team is mostly composed of ex-Google / ex-Stripe employees

– Gigalixir also has zero down time deploys for most deploys

– nginx isn’t being used and Gigalixir handles TLS too

– The push for HTTPS everywhere and Let’s Encrypt being easy but not that easy

– Accessing your logs on Gigalixir by tailing your logs on the command line

– Adam pays about $50 a month for everything on Gigalixir

– Metrics related to server health can be found in the Gigalixir dashboard

– Surviving the front page of HackerNews with an Elixir app on a hobby instance

– Depending on user feedback for error reporting

– It’s super nice to have a compiler warn you about flaws in your code

– Gigalixir lets you git push your code to get it from your dev box into production

– Code is also pushed to GitHub mainly for backup purposes

– Code is tested locally before being pushed but testing a Slack integration is hard

– Putting an app on the Slack app marketplace requires human review

– Managing secrets with Gigalixir is done through their CLI, similar to Heroku

– Database backups happen daily but the interval on Gigalixir can be configured

– Email alerts are sent out by Gigalixir if your app happens to go down

– Best tips? Leverage the Elixir community if you get stuck

– Enjoy a language that a bit of novelty to it since it’s still relatively young

– Getting help for basic things from the creator of Elixir on IRC

– Constantly looking at older code to see how it could be refactored

– Using the Credo library to help analyze your code base for best practices

– Check out their Slack app, follow Adam on Twitter @theadamconrad and GitHub