Elixir

When you need to process a large number of records in Elixir, the instinct is often to wrap everything in a transaction. All-or-nothing semantics, right? Safe by default. Turns out, this is one of those cases where the “safe” choice creates a bigger problem than the one you were trying to avoid. Here’s what’s actually happening under the hood, and a better approach that’s both safer and more efficient. The Naive Approach Let’s say you have a batch job that needs to process thousands of files, calling an external API for each one and saving the result to the database. ...

When you’re building a system that needs to execute many different “actions” (think AI-powered pipelines, data processing jobs, or any multi-step business logic) you quickly face a design question: how do you keep things extensible without coupling everything together? In Elixir, the answer often comes down to two powerful primitives: Behaviours and dynamic dispatch via atoms. Let me walk you through an architecture that elegantly solves this problem. The Problem: Many Actions, One Orchestrator Imagine you have an application that runs multiple independent actions, and that each one takes some input, does some processing, and produces a formatted output saved to a database. You could write each action as a standalone module with its own logic, but then whoever orchestrates them needs to know about every single one. That’s tight coupling, and it makes adding new actions painful. ...