Ok, controversial click bait title aside, personal software projects do an enormous amount of good in teaching you how to learn new languages, write better code, architect code and may even make you a buck or two on the side (if you are lucky). However, there are some things that you are not likely to learn when writing personal software projects and I wanted to discuss a few of them here. What they can't teach you How to communicate your ideas By definition a personal project is personal. You are probably the only one working on it (though you can ask a friend or two to help, which is highly advisable if you can). When you want to add a new software pattern or framework, you just do it. While that's incredibly liberating, one of the benefits of working in a team is having to explain your decisions will make you more reflective and will give you a better sense of if you are doing things the right way or not. If you meet with resistance to the idea, it means you have to th
Oooh them's fighting words. Anyways, this is definitely not true inheritance by any means, but let me explain the problem and then the solution. Ecto is the primary way you connect to the database in Phoenix. However, Ecto differs in many significant ways from ActiveRecord in Rails. You can set up a schema file which lists the relationships between your "models" or "entities", but these schemas do not allow you to directly access the database. They are merely descriptions of how the data is expressed. To access the database, you need to use a data context which uses Ecto. So, from my article comparing Active Record to Ecto ( http://www.skuunk.com/2020/01/comparing-rails-active-record-pattern.html ) defmodule Schema.Article do use Ecto.Schema import Ecto.Changeset alias Schema.Author alias Schema.Comment @permitted_fields [:title, :content] @required_fields [:title, :content] schema "article" do belongs_to(:author, Author)