Elixir Training

An Elixir programming course delivered as code + per-lesson reveal.js slide decks. The arc starts at programming-101 and finishes with the learner deploying a small Phoenix web app — backed by Postgres via Ecto, real-time LiveView, and OTP supervision — to production.

Hosted slide site: https://elixir.ristkari.dev/

Prerequisites

• asdf with the erlang and elixir plugins. The pinned versions live in .tool-versions:

  asdf install

• Docker (for Postgres from lesson 26 onward and for the release lesson + slides-docker target).
• Python 3 (used by the local slide server).
• Make.

Quick start

make help                          # list every available command
make new-lesson NAME=99-demo       # scaffold a sandbox lesson
make slides-dev LESSON=99-demo     # serve its deck on http://localhost:8000
make test                          # run all lesson exercises (skips @tag :pending)
make solutions-test                # run all lesson solutions (must all pass)
make lint                          # mix format --check + credo where declared
make slides-build                  # build dist/ static slide site
make slides-docker                 # build the deploy image + run on http://localhost:8080
make ci-smoke                      # harness self-tests (tooling smoke check)

Repository layout

lessons/NN-name/
├── README.md       self-study notes: objectives, key ideas, links
├── HINTS.md        progressively-revealed hints (beginner safety rail)
├── slides/         reveal.js deck (index.html + slides.md)
├── exercises/      starter Mix project + failing tests (the spec)
└── solutions/      reference Mix project + the same tests, passing

shared/reveal/                vendored reveal.js 5.1.0 (do not hand-edit)
shared/lesson-template/       scaffold copied by `make new-lesson`
tools/                        dev scripts the Makefile invokes
tools/build_index/            Elixir script that builds the static slide site
deploy/                       Dockerfile, nginx, Cloud Run spec, GCP bootstrap
docs/superpowers/specs/       course design specs
docs/superpowers/plans/       implementation plans
.github/workflows/            CI (lint + tests + slides-build) + Cloud Run deploy

Design

See docs/superpowers/specs/2026-05-21-elixir-course-design.md for the full course design.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the lesson-authoring conventions, slide style, dependency policy by phase, and local workflow.

Deployment

The slides site at https://elixir.ristkari.dev/ is rebuilt and redeployed by .github/workflows/deploy.yml on every push to main. The one-time GCP/Cloudflare bootstrap is documented in deploy/README.md.