kacaii.dev
💻 My personal website
blog.kacaii.dev/
blog
gleam
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posts/
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priv/posts/building-my-college-project-with-gleam.md
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priv/posts/building-my-college-project-with-gleam.md
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## Picking a language
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Every semester my college assigns us a major project. This usually meant coming up
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with a startup concept or designing a website in Figma, but we never got to
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actually put our ideas _into practice_. This semester was different.
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Every semester my college assigns us a major project. This usually meant
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coming up with a startup concept or designing a website in Figma, but we never
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got to actually put our ideas _into practice_. This semester was different.
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Our task was to build a project aimed at helping firefighters handle a *large volume* of incidents.
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Being responsible for the backend _mostly_ by myself, I was a bit insecure.
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I needed something reliable and built for getting things done _fast_.
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Our task was to build a project aimed at helping firefighters handle a
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*large volume* of incidents. Being responsible for the backend _mostly_ by
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myself, I was a bit insecure. I needed something reliable and built for getting
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things done _fast_.
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The rest of the class went with safer, popular choices like Python, TypeScript
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and Java. They're great for building an API, but I couldn't imagine doing
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### Errors as values
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One of the main reasons why I went with Gleam was their approach to *error handling*.
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Errors in Gleam are treated as _values_ you can return from any function.
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And the best part, *you can see if a function can fail by looking at its return type*.
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One of the main reasons why I went with Gleam was their approach
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to *error handling*. Errors in Gleam are treated as _values_ you can return
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from any function. And the best part, *you can see if a function can fail
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by looking at its return type*.
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```gleam
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fn do_work() -> Result(String, MyCustomError) {
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### Pattern matching
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Being able to build custom error types pairs really well with
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Gleam's *pattern matching*. You can define it at the top level scope and easily `switch`
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on all possible values.
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Gleam's *pattern matching*. You can define it at the top level scope and easily
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`switch` on all possible values.
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```gleam
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case err {
···
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## Working with SQL
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I'm really not a fan of using regular strings to store SQL queries,
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there's no *autocomplete*, no *syntax highlighting*, no *linting* from my editor.
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Luckily there's a package that takes care of all that for us!
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there's no *autocomplete*, no *syntax highlighting*, no *linting*
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from my editor. Luckily there's a package that takes care of all that for us!
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[Squirrel](https://hexdocs.pm/squirrel) finds all database queries in your project
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written in actual `.sql` files, and generates modules, decoders and
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```
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We can then query our database simply by calling a function.
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There's no need to set up an ORM, build complicated decoders or do anything fancy.
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One thing you'll hear a lot from the Gleam community is that
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[all you need is data and functions.](https://mckayla.blog/posts/all-you-need-is-data-and-functions.html)
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There's no need to set up an ORM, build complicated decoders
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or do anything fancy. One thing you'll hear a lot from the Gleam community
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is that [all you need is data and functions.](https://mckayla.blog/posts/all-you-need-is-data-and-functions.html)
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```gleam
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// Querying a database might fail, so it returns a `Result`!
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The returned results can easily be encoded into Json and sent to the client
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through the response body. There's even a LSP code action for it!
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Just mouse over the type you want to generate an encoder for, and trigger the code
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action selector by using your IDE.
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Just mouse over the type you want to generate an encoder for,
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and trigger the code action selector by using your IDE.
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```gleam
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import gleam/json
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## Conclusion
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This was my first time building a backend project, and if it didn't work as expected,
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the whole group would be affected. Thankfully we ran into zero runtime errors so far,
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and all endpoints behaved as intended.
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This was my first time building a backend project, and if it didn't work
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as expected, the whole group would be affected. Thankfully we ran into zero
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runtime errors so far, and all endpoints behaved as intended.
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Errors were explicit, data had clear shapes and most error messages felt more like guidance
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than of a bunch of scrambled text. If you ever need a reliable backend API, I trully
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recommend you [give Gleam a try](https://gleam.run/).
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Errors were explicit, data had clear shapes and most error messages felt more
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like guidance than of a bunch of scrambled text. If you ever need a reliable
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backend API, I trully recommend you [give Gleam a try](https://gleam.run/).
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priv/posts/uses.md
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priv/posts/uses.md
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### Version Control
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- [ ]{.nf aria-hidden=true} [Tangled][]: I recently moved away
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from Github, tangled feels like breath of fresh air. All data is stored in my PDS[^pds]
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from Github, tangled feels like breath of fresh air. All data is stored in my
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PDS[^pds]
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- [ ]{.nf aria-hidden=true} [Jujutsu][]: Feels more flexible and intuitive
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than Git, also tangled has support for it!
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