Top all-time · #10120
Cogini
Company blog · cogini.com/blog · on HN as jake_morrisonprogrammingbusiness
Cogini is the company blog at cogini.com, writing about programming and business. Since 2018, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Best Practices for Deploying Elixir Apps”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Cogini's posts on Elixir and Phoenix, including benchmarks of Phoenix on Digital Ocean. Commenters cite them as data points and sources rather than praising the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Professional product development services for ambitious innovators
Most-linked posts?
- /blog/benchmarking-phoenix-on-digital-ocean/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-11-08
- Best Practices for Deploying Elixir Apps2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-05-21
- Avoiding GenServer Bottlenecks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-07
What Hacker News says?
We had a problem where after about 10 years, PayPal suddenly decided that our account was in the wrong country, and the only solution was to close it. Kafkaesque. I wrote about it here: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...
Comment linking /blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failure/
on “The Machine Fired Me”Submitted Advantages of Elixir vs. Golang as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPayPal blocked us after 10 years due to a a Kafkaesque problem, where they decided that our Hong Kong company was both a Chinese company and not a Chinese company: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...
Comment linking /blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failure/
on “We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business”Submitted Best Practices for Deploying Elixir Apps as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou can do something similar with docker compose, driving the system from the outside. Create dockerized versions of dependencies like the database, build and run tests, and then run tests against the production app container. It's particularly useful for testing a set of microservices. See https://github.com/cogini/phoenix_container_example for a full example. This blog post describes it in detail: https://www.cogi…
Comment linking /blog/breaking-up-the-monolith-building-testing-and-deploying-microservices/
on “Testcontainers”Submitted Avoiding GenServer Bottlenecks as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> copy and paste a higher-level construct like an Agent or Genserver and add the 1 line of code to this root supervisor that was just a file auto-generated in your project. But that'll get you a) introduced to the actor model and b) thinking about messaging while c) not ever worrying about or messing up concurrency. Isn't it well known that GenServers can become severe bottlenecks unless you know the inner workings…
Comment linking /blog/avoiding-genserver-bottlenecks/
on “Elixir Is Erlang, not Ruby”Submitted The Four Stages of Santa Claus for Software Developers (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSadly this thread didn't pick up much but I found this https://www.cogini.com/blog/benchmarking-phoenix-on-digital-...
Comment linking /blog/benchmarking-phoenix-on-digital-ocean/
on “Phoenix 1.4.0 released”Submitted Deploying your Phoenix app to Digital Ocean for beginners as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere's some benchmark for Phoenix + Digital Ocean drop - https://www.cogini.com/blog/benchmarking-phoenix-on-digital-... . But without database stuff. And here: https://elixirforum.com/t/7-5-second-average-page-load-speed... "It’s my fault for the inline Markdown, really. The pages that don’t do that handle over 1k/second."
Comment linking /blog/benchmarking-phoenix-on-digital-ocean/
on “Phoenix 1.4.0 released”Elixir/Erlang has some of the most mature ways of interoperating with external code of any language. It's literally what Erlang was invented for 30 years ago, building telephone switches where the main logic was on the Erlang VM, interfacing with logic in C which interfaces with the switch hardware. There are multiple ways of doing it, each with different tradeoffs of safety and performance. You can write FFI code u…
Comment linking /blog/elixir-and-embedded-programming-presentation/
on “I finally escaped Node”We run in cloud or dedicated server instances. We deploy using Erlang "releases" using systemd for process supervision. We build on a continuous integration server and deploy using Ansible or AWS CodeDeploy. I have written a detailed guide here: https://www.cogini.com/blog/best-practices-for-deploying-eli...
Comment linking /blog/best-practices-for-deploying-elixir-apps/
on “What Sucks About Erlang (2008)”The fundamental model behind Terraform is declarative. You use the Terraform language to define resources for your target system, e.g. a load balancer in AWS. You then run Terraform and it checks the desired configuration vs the running configuration, and it shows the differences. If the new config is what you want, you apply the changes, and it updates the production system. Ansible is much more of an imperative sy…
Comment linking /blog/is-it-time-for-lisp-in-devops/
on “Ask HN: What is the real difference between Terraform and Ansible?”A few years ago I did an embedded Linux project on an ARM7 CPU without an MMU, a vehicle tracker for trucks with GPS, cellular modem, ODB2 interface, and other I/O. Lack of MMU caused some unexpected issues: * Because there is no MMU, there are no shared libraries. All the binaries have to be statically linked. We had a total of 2MB of ROM, of which about 1M was the Linux kernel. So we ran out of space for the progr…
Comment linking /blog/debugging-your-space-probe/
on “MMU-less systems and FDPIC”I went through a Kafkaesque experience with PayPal's Know Your Customer verification process. They screwed something up internally and decided that my company was in a different country. https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...
Comment linking /blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failure/
on “Tell HN: Do not store any funds in PayPal or use them for anything critical”