The point of the blog

I've been working on a replacement for Critter4Us, an app I wrote ten years ago for the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine. It's an app used for scheduling and tracking teaching animals. Reserving a teaching animal is something like reserving a meeting room, but with different business logic. For example, if a particular cow were used to demonstrate embryo transfer too often, the College could get in trouble with the US Department of Agriculture.

I'm writing the replacement in Elixir, using Phoenix (a server-side web framework) and Ecto (a data mapper and query generator that I connect to Postgres). While my new version has to replace the old version in the summer of 2020, I'm also using it to experiment and learn new things.

My motto for this blog comes from a way I've sometimes heard religious evangelism described: one begger telling another where she found a crust of bread. I like the humility of that. When I find things out, I'll write them down, hoping they'll be useful to my fellow beggars. My strong bias is toward posts with code samples you can copy from my app's repository and adapt to your own. (I'd rather give someone an actual crust than rhapsodize about the characteristics of an ideal crust.)

There are a few posts before this one. I scavenged them from an old blog. I might also resurrect others.