One of the first projects I was working on in Elixir was an API gateway. Like everyone else, I saw Pheonix, which is a cool framework for building web servers which is similar to Express.js, but, for my use case, I wanted raw performance for the API gateway, and one of its features was to have basic authentication as well as bearer authentication for json web tokens. One way to achieve this was using Plugs, which are built in the language. A plug is similar to a middleware in Express.js, it accepts input, does some manipulation and either halts the request or passes it on. In this post I will show how I implemented an authentication plug in Elixir.

When I first saw the ideas of functional programming, I found them very strange due to the fact that, I, like most people, got used to structural and object oriented programming paradigms. The structural takes away the goto definitions from our code and replaces them with if/else/do/while, which forces the code to execute in an order. The object oriented, encapsulates local variables and methods long after a function returns (what eventually became a constructor) and through the use of function pointers introduced polymorphism. In this post, I will introduce you to functional programming.

After writing software for the past 6 years, I realized that the implementations that we write are far more important than the languages we choose, but, having a developer friendly, safe, strict language, can guide you towards better implementations. That is why I set out to search for a new programming language, that will replace my daily driver - Node.js. In a search for a new programming language, I asked myself two questions - what are the must-have features I expect from a programming language? and do its pros outweigh its cons?
In this post, I will weigh some of Javascript’s pros and cons, later on, I will list the features, I believe, a programming language should have, afterwards, I will explain why I chose to learn Elixir and at last, I will weigh Elixir’s pros and cons.