Welcome to GigaElixir Gazette, your 5-minute digest of Elixir ecosystem news that actually matters 👋.

At Gigalixir, we're the only platform built specifically for Elixir/Phoenix apps – giving you distributed clustering, remote console, and production observer without the DevOps nightmare.

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. WEEKLY PICKS .

🔑 Phoenix 1.8's Magic Link Authentication Takes Center Stage:

Phoenix 1.8's revamped phx.gen.auth ditches traditional password flows for email-based magic links as the primary authentication method. While this eliminates password-related security concerns, it forces every Phoenix project to require transactional email services – even toy projects. Smart teams are already planning infrastructure upgrades to handle the new authentication requirements.

Upgrade your auth stack

🐰 Most Developers Are Breaking RabbitMQ Publisher Confirms:

Popular Elixir libraries like AMQPX and GenRMQ create massive bottlenecks by using synchronous AMQP.Confirm.wait_for_confirms/2 inside GenServer callbacks, preventing concurrent publishing. High-performance teams use AMQP.Confirm.register_handler/2 with ETS tables for asynchronous confirmation handling instead. The difference in throughput is dramatic – while most apps choke under load, properly architected systems handle thousands of concurrent publishes.

Fix your message publishing

🎙️ Elixir Podcast Ecosystem Remains Surprisingly Healthy:

Four actively maintained Elixir podcasts released episodes within the past 90 days, showing remarkable consistency in a niche community. Thinking Elixir, Elixir Mentor, Elixir em Foco (Portuguese), and BEAM Radio continue delivering quality technical content while most programming podcasts fade into irrelevance. The international presence proves Elixir's global developer mindshare is growing, not shrinking.

Subscribe to stay ahead

📚 Interactive Learning Finally Solves the Functional Programming Barrier:

"An Animated Introduction to Elixir" uses innovative "code playbacks" to teach functional programming step-by-step with visual annotations. While most developers struggle with the mental shift from OOP to functional thinking, this tutorial makes pattern matching and actor concurrency immediately comprehensible. Smart teams are using it to onboard new hires faster than traditional documentation ever could.

Level up your team

. PRO TIPS .

Your GenServer State is Probably Too Big (And Costing You Performance)

Here's what everyone gets wrong about GenServers: they treat them like object-oriented classes, stuffing everything into state. Your Phoenix app crawls under load? Nine times out of ten, it's bloated GenServer state causing serialization bottlenecks during deployments and memory pressure during runtime.

Everyone talks about supervision trees and fault tolerance, but smart teams obsess over state size. They never store computed values, cached API responses, or "convenience" data in GenServer state. That product catalog you're caching? That user session data? That aggregated metrics object? None of it belongs in GenServer state.

Instead, they use ETS tables for caching and keep GenServer state lean – just the minimal data needed for coordination and control flow. A shopping cart GenServer might only store cart_id, user_id, and last_activity – everything else lives in ETS or gets computed on demand.

The payoff is massive: hot code reloading happens instantly instead of timing out, memory usage stays predictable, and you avoid those dreaded "GenServer timeout" errors that happen when state serialization takes too long during deployments.

Remember, for GenServer state management:

1. Store only coordination data – IDs, timestamps, and control flags only

2. Use ETS for caching – computed values, API responses, and lookups belong here

3. Compute on demand – derive data from minimal state rather than pre-computing

4. Measure state size – if it's over a few KB, you're probably doing it wrong

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Deploy your next Elixir app hassle-free with Gigalixir and focus more on coding, less on ops.

We're specifically designed to support all the features that make Elixir special, so you can keep building amazing things without becoming a DevOps expert.

See you next week,

Michael

P.S. Forward this to a friend who loves Elixir as much as you do 💜