🔗 Elixir Makes You Make Good Decisions

A month ago my cofounder and I launched screen.garden, a sync and multiplayer collaboration backend for Obsidian that also allows access to your vault from the web. It was a nights-and-weekends thing for us, the kind of project that steals sleep from the pure joy of working on it. We chose Elixir and Phoenix as the language/framework for building it, and now that we’re a month out I’m convinced that Elixir (and Phoenix, and Ecto, and…) makes you make make good decisions.

Real quick: if you use Obsidian for note-taking and wish it could do the Google Docs thing without making you leave your vault, take a look at screen.garden. It’s super fast, and taking meeting notes right in Obsidian with multiple cursors zooming around the note never gets old. I wrote this post with it, getting edits from others right in Obsidian.

I am a programmer. I’m in the business of making bad coding decisions, it’s sort of our whole thing. Staring at code written six months ago and saying out loud what idiot wrote this? only to discover the idiot was you is, I’m pretty sure, a required credit in every CS program worldwide. But it’s eerie how solid our early architectural and structural decisions have been, how every dependency has been, well, dependable, and how easy shipping new features is.