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by Champagn3Papi 950 days ago
I switched jobs and working as an elixir dev now. I love elixir don't get me wrong, but some of the documentation especially some of the more advanced features in ecto are very confusing.

It doesn't help you can define your ecto instructions in multiple flavors too (inline vs piping)

You can't mix inline with pipe operators without creating an additiona variable too hold the original query.

If we want to make it less niche, there's definitely good working points there. Once people understand how to hit a database from elixir it magically clicks and the other stuff is more trivial.

2 comments

Ecto documentation is definitely i think one of our weakest point.

Which is great on one hand, because it means we are quite above the average stack in term of onboarding and doc.

But also really makes ecto documentation and onboarding a visible sore point in the middle of the rest.

Sadly i do not have solutions rn but if people have ideas please come offer them.

Ecto is a specific area and I must say I share your view on the "flavours" aspect (keywords vs not). I would personally love if there was only "one way".

And agree that there are both excellent documentation, _and_ things that are kind of "assumed" and would need better "beginner" stuff (in my opinion).