QFM074: Elixir Reading List - July 2025

Goatmire Elixir & NervesConf EU 2026 will take place September 28–October 2 in Varberg, Sweden, featuring free community workshops on September 28-29 at Campus Varberg, followed by a three-day conference starting September 30 with day one dedicated to NervesConf EU focusing on Nerves framework topics. A Call for Talks is open for speakers, with the event expanding capacity while maintaining its intimate, community-focused atmosphere that prioritizes engagement and knowledge-sharing among Elixir developers.

Ash Framework is a declarative application framework that models your domain using DSLs and introspectable data structures, allowing you to derive all supporting functionality—authentication, admin interfaces, APIs, observability—without manually building commodity features. By separating business logic in the application layer from presentation and data layers, Ash lets developers focus on innovative, differentiating features rather than reinventing standard components that exist across thousands of applications. The framework's macros and DSLs are not "dark magic" but rather transformations of declarative definitions into traversable data structures that enable extensive code generation and flexibility.

Function composition in Elixir involves building complex functionality by combining small, single-purpose functions rather than writing large monolithic ones, leveraging techniques like the pipe operator (|>), anonymous functions, and higher-order functions to create reusable and testable code. The article demonstrates composition methods including manual nesting, piping, and creating new composed functions using function references, showing how to chain operations like doubling and incrementing numbers into a single composed function. This approach improves code readability, testability, and maintainability by allowing functions to be easily reused, modified, and rearranged.