How to help your growing team grow its book club — Our weekly technical book club is one of the things that I think makes our engineering team at the Flatiron School special. …

or, be the changeset you want to see in the world — This post explains how Ecto.Changeset can help you make safer changes to your data by providing a foundation for thinking more strategically about providing multiple update policies. A troublesome update scenario Imagine you're building an application that does a lot of complex business workflows. Like creating invoices and sending them out. Maybe there are different…

Inheritance is easy — until you have to deal with technical debt and taxes. — When Learn’s main codebase came into existence five years ago, Single Table Inheritance (STI) was pretty popular. The Flatiron Labs team at the time went all in on it — using it for everything from assessments and curriculum to activity feed events and content within our growing learning management system…

As an Elixir novice, I think one of the hardest things about getting started in Elixir is figuring out what kind of data structures to use. My team has recently started going all in on Elixir, so I’ve been trying to brush up in earnest. Often, however, I’ll be reading over some of…

Learn about the engineering process and tech stack behind Learn.co’s IDE in Browser. — This post originally appeared on the Flatiron School blog. This week, Flatiron School’s Engineering team rolled out the Learn IDE (Integrated Development Environment) in browser — complete with file tree, text editor, and terminal window. Now, when you do a lab on Flatiron’s Learn.co …

Ask any developer what part of their jobs they loathe the most and you’ll frequently hear the words “code review”. — Code review is sometimes the step blocking you from shipping. It may even be the final thing standing between you and the end of your project sprint — the one you’ve been working on for months and can’t wait to end. More poetically, it’s a time when you, the developer…

Test-driven Learning on Learn.co — If you’ve ever done a lesson on Learn.co, one of the first things you’ll notice is the lights. That’s what we affectionately call the little icons on the right of our lesson pages — those little markers of progress that change whenever you complete a required task, or, “assessment” in…