In this post you get an insight into how you can turn asynchronous requests into synchronous ones, using a GenServer and the handle_call function without a reply in place. This is possible because of an existing reply/2 function that enables us to explicitly send a reply to a client when the reply cannot be specified in the return value of handle_call/3. There are a few catches, of course, so be sure to read till the end

During the last 12 months, more or less, I had to build 3 different services that were highly concurrent and required some degree of resilience and fault tolerance. These services had different requirements and did completely different things, but after the third one, I noticed that I’m pretty much using the same recipe for the structure. That’s what I’ll talk about in this blog post, and at the end, I expect to have given enough insight into this recipe, so that you can also follow it in your next project or even make it better.

It’s probably a bit too late to be making a 2022 recap, we are almost at the end of January, and when I post this there’s a chance it’s already February, but better late than never… Let’s dive into what happened in 2022, and then have a look into my 2023 plans.

On the last weekend of October, we (finiam) participated in ETHLisbon, an Ethereum-related hackathon, and for the last few weeks I had been reading Genetic Algorithms in Elixir by Sean Moriarity, and I was hooked on giving them a try in a use case outside the book.

We want to pre-generate the metadata for a set of NFTs that will have several attributes, using mathematical distributions. This metadata has information on the traits of that specific NFT, in this case, each attribute type and the respective value.