This post was originally published on CodeCast by Tam Kbeili.

I strongly believe that Elixir is the best programming language to get started with the functional programming paradigm for many reasons. Here are a few of them:

Elixir is Simple & Elegant

Elixir leverages the Erlang Virtual Machines(VM). If you haven’t heard of Erlang, it’s a programming language introduced way back in 1986 to help telcos and many of them still use it to operate their equipment. Erlang has been built to be distributed, fault-tolerant, and performant. There is one small program with Erlang: Syntax can be very ugly. Check this page for an example.

Functional programming languages have their roots in math so they can be abstract with many complex algebraic data types. Elixir is dynamically typed and heavily inspired by the Ruby language which is probably the most simple and most elegant programming language out there. I have taught and used many programming languages in the past and always noticed that students accelerate their programming learning faster with Ruby than with other languages. It almost feels like Ruby as a language fades out and leaves students to focus on understanding and applying programming principles. Elixir is not far off from Ruby syntax-wise.

I do have to say that, generally speaking, object-oriented programming (OOP) is easier to get started with than functional programming. It’s much easier for the human brain to visualize objects that store states and interact with each other than many functions that call each other and pass data around. That said, functional programming has many benefits over OOP (I will get into this in another article). Elixir, I believe, is the best gateway language to functional programming and is very practical.‍

Elixir is Very Performant

Historically, one of the tradeoffs when choosing a programming language has been elegance/simplicity vs performance. Ruby is very elegant but not performant, and C++ is very performant but complex. Elixir managed to find an amazing middle ground with beautiful syntax and high performance. Leveraging the Erlang VM, you get a good base level of performance. In addition, Elixir makes it very simple to run code in parallel, a task that usually takes understanding many hard concepts and writing not-so-easy code.

Running code in parallel is becoming more and more important as chip companies such as Intel are not able to cram more transistors into microprocessors, so we’re getting processors that have more cores instead. Parallelizing your program enables it to take advantage of the multiple cores. With Elixir, the task is significantly easier than using traditional languages that support multi-threading like Java.

For instance, some claim that Phoenix, the most Elixir popular web framework is 7X+ more performant than Rails, the most popular Ruby web framework. You can read more about that here.

Of course, you can write something more performant in say Java, Scala or C++. That said, I believe the potency of Elixir comes from the right amount of the key ingredients: performance, elegance, and simplicity.

Elixir has a Growing Ecosystem

Simplicity and performance are completely useless if you don’t have a vibrant community. Luckily Elixir has a growing and supportive community. Here are a few key indicators:

• There are key frameworks that are very mature in Elixirs such as Phoenix for web applications and Nerves for hardware
• There are libraries for most of the key operations you are likely to do Elixir
• Elixir conferences have become more frequent with growing attendance
• You are likely to find answers to most questions you face by Googling with yield results from StackOverFlow or ElixirForum

In conclusion, I highly recommend trying a sip of the purple and delicious Elixir to get transported into the functional programming wonderland. You will certainly like it!‍

‍

If this blog made you curious about Elixir, you should definitely hop on to a live event I am doing on June 25, 2022. I will be discussing the basic building blocks of Elixir and will integrate with https://swapi.dev/ which is a fun open API that returns Star Wars characters and movie data. I will also be answering any questions you have and guide you.

Register for the event here.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Elixir As Your First Functional Language was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Happy Friday 😌

Every week we go through the new tutorials made by our community and find three videos we think you would love. As always, our creators have been busy creating incredible content, and this week we’re featuring videos on Python & JavaScript.

Codewars: You’re A Square (JavaScript)

Codewars is a coding challenge site designed to get users to “achieve mastery through challenge”.

In this video, Amy Oulton tackles the “You’re A Square” challenge in JavaScript. This isn’t the first Kata (what they call their challenges) that she has tackled in JavaScript! She has also created tutorials on the Vowel Count, Grasshopper, and Simple Pig Latin challenges!

Amy has created over 80 tutorials on CodeCast on topics like JavaScript, CSS, Elixir & Figma so be sure to follow her and check out her content.

Web Security with Python: Dictionary Attack

Jesus Villa is a security engineer with a passion for what he does. He creates tutorials showing how simple it is for someone to exploit weaknesses in a website, and then shows you how to secure it!

In this tutorial, he focuses on something called a dictionary attack, which is essentially where people hack your password by entering systematically trying every word in a dictionary.

Jesus has an entire series on Web Security with Python for free on CodeCast, so it’s definitely worth checking out if this is something you’re interested in!

Python Challenges: Get The Middle Character

Maria Villa loves Python and regularly creates tutorials on coding challenges!

In this tutorial, she tackles the simple problem of returning the middle character of a given string.

Coding challenges are a fantastic way to increase your skills and practice what you’re learned!

CodeCast has tons of different tutorials on popular topics like JavaScript, Python, Elixir, React, and more! Plus, you get the code AND the video in a single player! 😌 Be sure to sign up for an account (completely free) to get the most out of our tutorials!

Codewars, Python Challenges & Web Security: Top 3 Tutorials of the Week 💻 was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Happy Friday everyone! 😌

Every Friday at CodeCast we give love to our Top 3 Casts of the week. We’re lucky to have some fantastic creators producing great tutorials for us. This week we’re featuring content on Elixir, Web Security (with Python), and Building a Chrome Extension! So without further ado…

Elixir: The |> Operator by @amy

Our founder Tam has created a 7-hour introductory course on Elixir and most of the videos end with exercises to do on your own time. Amy has created her own series working through these exercises, and this tutorial goes over the exercises working with the |> operator.

Server Side Request Forgery by @jesusvilla

Jesus is a security engineer and is passionate about showcasing weak spots and flaws so you can write stronger, more secure code. This Cast focuses on how you people can trick the server into making requests it shouldn’t!

Procrasti..nator: Chrome Extension: Introduction by @kauress

Chrome extensions are very popular and can be incredible tools. Google has an entire Chrome Extension API with fantastic docs to help you develop your own Chrome extension. In this first part of her course, Jannat goes over what you’ll be creating!

Top 3 Coding Tutorials of the Week was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

One of the first linear structures that we will be talking about is stacks. To re-iterate:

In a linear data structure all the elements are sequentially arranged one after the other. Therefore each element is connected to elements before and after. These are organized as a single level and users can traverse through the elements of a linear data structure in a single run. Linear data structures are mainly used in software applications.

Characteristics of stack data structure

Stacks are an ordered list of elements. They follow the last in, first out (LIFO) principle. This means that the last element to be added to a stack is the first element that will be removed from it. Much like a stack of pancakes, the last pancake to be placed on the plate is the first to be eaten. A stack can have any abstract data type as an element contained within it which is why you will also notice it being categorized as an abstract data type. Taking short detour, an abstract data type is one whose implementation is hidden from us. Stacks have two principle operations, called push and pop which refer to adding and removing elements from a stack. These two operations happen at the same end of a stack. So the first element to be added to a stack will be the last one to be removed. Similarly, the last item to be added to the stack will be the first one to be removed.

Where are stacks used

Stacks are used to to process function calls, store variables in a computer’s memory, evaluate math expressions and more

Stack operations

Keeping in mind the LIFO principle, the following are operations that can be done on a stack data structure. You may be acquainted with some of these operations such as push(), pop() etc:

• Insertion/push(): adding elements to a stack. Adding and removing elements to a stack happens at the same location which is the top of the stack.
• deletion/pop(): removing elements from a stack. This happens at the same location as adding an element which is the top of the stack.
• peek(): taking a peek at the top most element in a stack without removing it
• isEmpty(): true will be returned is the stack is empty. Else false is returned
• clear(): removing all elements from a stack
• size(): returns the number of items in a stack
• display(): display all the elements in a stack
• change(): change an element at a given position in a stack

Implementation of stack data structure

A stack data structure can be implemented using a one-dimensional array an linked list.

Arrays

Let’s use some common stack operations on an array using JavaScript, starting with the insertion operation using the push() which adds an element to the end of an array:

let array1  =  [1,2,3,4];
array1.push(5);
//[1,2,3,4,5

Similarly we can use the pop() method for the deletion operation which will remove/pop off an element from the end of an array

array1.pop();
//[1,2,3,4]

The peek operation lets us access the top post element of a stack

let array1  =  [1,2,3,4];
console.log(array1.length -1) //3

We can clear all the elements in a stack by resetting the the array:

let array1 =[]

We can also iterate through the array and use the pop() method to keep removing the last element of an array for the length of the array. The length of an array refers to the number of items in an array. For example:

let array1 = [1,2,3,4];
for(let i = 0; i = array1.length; i++){
 array1.pop()
}
console.log(array1);// []

There is no native isEmpty() method in JavaScript to check whether an array is empty, instead we can check if the length property of the array is greater than 1:

array1.length === 0; //array is empty

To change the element at a particular position in an array, we will reference the particular array index and then change the value at said index:

array1[1] = "a"; //["a",2,3,4]

With all the above information, now let’s construct a stack class in JavaScript in which we will implement all the above methods from scratch:

class Stack {

	constructor() {
		this.items = [];
	}
	//JS has a built in push() so let's use that
	push(el) {
		this.items.push(el)
	}
	//JS has a built in pop() so let's use that
	pop(el) {
		if (this.el.length === 0) {
			return false;
		} else {
			this.el.pop()
		}
	}
	//peek
	peek() {
		return this.items[this.items.length - 1];
	}

	//clear

	clear() {
		this.items = []
	}
	//display all elements of the stack to the console
	display() {
		for (var i = 0; i < this.items.length; i++) {
			console.log(this.items[i])
		}
	}
	//size(): get the size of an array by querying the length property
	size() {
		console.log(this.items.length);
	}

	//empty(): return true if the length of the array is 0 
	empty() {
		if (this.items.length < 1) {
			console.log("The array is empty");
		} else {
			return true
		}
	}
}

Byte size info: Stack data Structures was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TGIF! 🙌🏻

Every Friday at CodeCast we give love to our Top 3 Casts of the week. We’re always so excited to review the content by our incredible creators. This week, we’re featuring Casts on Cyber Security, JavaScript, and Phoenix! So let’s dive into it.

Intro to Phoenix: Ecto — Migrations and Schemas Basics by @tam

Tam is the founder of CodeCast and a lover of the Elixir language. We use Elixir and the Phoenix framework extensively in CodeCast. Tam has previously created a 7-hour introductory course on Elixir and is now currently working on a course for Phoenix. This Cast is one of the videos that will be included in the Series, and it’s a great introduction to working with migrations.

Stored XSS using SVG by @jesusvilla

Jesus is a security engineer and is passionate about showcasing weak spots and flaws so you can write stronger, more secure code. This Cast focuses on using SVGs (or as he calls them “Something” Vector Graphics 😆) to run some simple JS code, and how these can be used in XXS attacks. He shows you how to prevent this in your SVGs!

Spread Operator in JavaScript by @kauress

Any fan of JavaScript knows how amazing the spread operator can be. Jannat goes over varying use-cases of the ... operator in this Cast so you can become an even better JS dev!

Want even more videos on JavaScript? We have over 120 video tutorials on JavaScript, ranging from specific topics to a course on building out entire applications like a trivia game!

Top 3 Coding Tutorials of the Week was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Happy Friday! Every Friday at CodeCast we give love to our Top 3 Casts of the week. Our community has been growing quickly, and we’re lucky to have many talented developers creating incredible content. This week, we’re featuring JavaScript! From vanilla JavaScript to frameworks like Express.js.

Chatty Chat App: Setting Up The Server by @kauress

Jannat is creating an ongoing series based on working with APIs, and in the third video of the Chatty Chat series, she works with Express.js to set up the server. It’s a perfect video for those wanting to set up an Express.js server for the first time!

JavaScript Coding Challenge: Ternary Operators by @kuangdia

In the third installment of Diana’s coding challenge series, she focuses on ternary operators. Her videos are fantastic challenges for anyone wanting to brush up on their JavaScript or test their abilities. Alongside this one, she has one on Regular Expressions as well as common white-boarding questions.

Destructuring Arrays in JavaScript by @kauress

Knowing how to work with arrays efficiently is an important part of coding with JavaScript. Arrays are widely used and being able to destruct them and pull pieces of them out is vital. Jannat takes you into different methods of destructing arrays so you can become an expert at working with arrays in no time.

Want even more videos on JavaScript? We have over 120 video tutorials on JavaScript, ranging from specific topics to building out entire applications like a trivia game!

Top 3 JavaScript Tutorials of the Week was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One of the first things you ever want to do when getting started in the Web3 space is to set up a “wallet”. A crypto wallet is just what it sounds like — a virtual wallet that stores your tokens for different cryptocurrencies. Wallets have also become your way to log in and authorize yourself with decentralized applications (DApps). So with that said, it makes sense why having a wallet of your own is one of the first steps you need to take.

Why MetaMask?

There are a lot of different options when it comes to choosing which wallet you want to set up. Personally, I really like MetaMask because I find it very user-friendly in its interface and extension, and it’s widely supported. I often come across a lot of smaller DApps that only support login with MetaMask.

It’s definitely one of the most popular wallets currently being used, and you won’t hesitate to find any amount of tutorials on it.

Setting Up Your Wallet

Firstly I have an entire video tutorial walking you through this process, so if you’re a fan of video tutorials, be sure to check that out! Otherwise, let’s get started:

Step One: Install MetaMask

You can install MetaMask as a browser extension at metamask.io. It’s supported on Chrome, Firefox, Brave & Edge, so as long as you’re not stuck in the days of Internet Explorer, you should be good! 😂

If it’s your first time setting it up, I highly recommend watching the video of the Secret Passphrase. It’s incredibly important to understand what it is and to keep a copy of it safe and secure.

Once you’ve finished setting it up the extension should look like this:

Step 2: Add the Polygon Network

You can add the Polygon network easily by going to https://polygonscan.com/. Scroll down to the footer and click “Add Polygon Network”.

This will prompt you in the wallet to add the network. It will flag a warning at the bottom asking you to verify that the chain ID yourself. The Chain ID for Polygon is 137, and it’s always a good habit to get in the habit of confirming that ID is correct for extra security when you aren’t manually adding a network yourself. The network is called “Matic Mainnet”, since Matic is the currency of the network.

If you prefer to manually add the Polygon network, you can do so by clicking on the “Ethereum Mainnet” in your wallet and then selecting “Add A Network” at the bottom of the dropdown menu.

You can fill out the new network as follows:

Now your network should be set up and look as follows:

And that’s it! As far as the Polygon network, the setup portion is complete. You can add money to your wallet by clicking on “Buy”. It will assist you through Transak, which is their integrated way to purchase crypto.

Step 3: Using The Wallet To Buy on OpenSea

So now what? Well, that depends on you. For the sake of this tutorial, we are going to discuss purchasing NFTs on OpenSea. OpenSea is one of the largest marketplaces for NFTs and it supports the Polygon chain. However, they don’t process payments with Matic but actually use ETH on the Polygon chain.

This is where a lot of people get confused but don’t worry, I’m going to walk you through it.

In your wallet, you’re going to hit the “Swap” button. You will need to have the amount of Matic you want to convert already in your wallet, plus a little bit extra for the gas conversion fee.

Once you’ve done that, enter the amount of Matic you want to swap to ETH, and search for ETH (Ether) in the “Swap to” section, as shown below:

You will then see something similar to this:

This highlights the conversion: how much ETH you’re getting for the Matic you’re converting, as well as the estimated gas fee. Once you’ve confirmed the amount is correct, you can go ahead and hit swap.

I want to point out that this is actually WETH (Wrapped ETH). You can read more about OpenSea using WETH here.

Once you’ve converted the amount it will show it as either ETH or WETH, depending. They have the same contract address and are the same token for the sake of working with OpenSea.

Now, you can go to OpenSea and purchase the NFTs of your dreams! Connect OpenSea with your wallet and you’ll have your OpenSea account. The first time you make a purchase on the Polygon network you’ll need to “Unlock” the currency, which is a one-time fee. Then you’re free to buy as you wish!

If you found this article helpful and enjoy my educational content, I want to express my thanks, as well as share that I offer a lot of exclusive educational content for holders of Boos!, an NFT project that I lead. It would be fantastic if you would check it out, and it’s the perfect NFT for newbies because any holder gets access to the locked section of our discord where you’ll have access to chat with our devs and creators, as well as access to all the educational content that is exclusive to our holders (and we have lots more coming)!

Set-Up & Use A MetaMask Wallet on the Polygon Network was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Interested in learning Web3? It’s a booming topic that has garnished a ton of interest in the last year. Most people have heard of NFTs, even if they aren’t sure what exactly they are. One of our core creators, Amy Oulton, recently published an article highlighting some of the common terminologies in Web3.

Web3 Basics Cheat Sheet

We announced our project and our latest collection, Boos! recently. While the Boos! are adorable ghosts that we love assigning personalities to, our goal behind creating these NFTs is twofold — to build a community of people interested in Web3, and to share exclusive educational content with the holders of our NFTs.

Investing in a Boos! NFT gives you access to exclusive channels within our Discord Server, which provide you with:

• ongoing direct access to the core team and developers behind Boos!
• tutorials and educational content created by the lead developer of Boos!
• exclusive giveaways and first chances at being whitelisted for upcoming collections

The Boos! collection minted 500 NFTs on Monday, and we’ve been loving the response from the community so far.

If you’re interested in joining the Boos! community and getting a ghost for yourself, they’re currently on the Polygon network for 0.01 ETH/Polygon! You can purchase them on OpenSea!

Web3 Education Meets NFTs was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We had a clear goal when we started Codewranglrz: learn as much about the Web3 space as possible. All of us learn the best by creating things for ourselves, so it made sense to dive directly into the NFT space by creating our own collection.

Boos! are an adorable collection of ghosts with fun personalities. Surrounding them is a community of ghosthunters who share in our enthusiasm!

When it came time to decide the utility for our NFTs, we played around with a lot of ideas. There are so many things people are doing to add value to their NFTs beyond the art, and we decided why not add the same value to them that we got out of creating them?

Our Boos! NFTs provide holders exclusive access to educational material surrounding Web3. If you’re interested in developing in the Web3 space, creating NFT collections yourself, or just grasping the DeFi space as a whole, Boos! are an adorable way to get started.

Our Boos! are going live on OpenSea on April 18th at 12:00PM PST! For around $30USD, you can dip your toes into the NFT space by holding an adorable ghost while gaining access to ongoing educational content.

Once you purchase the NFT, simply validate the NFT in our discord server to unlock the exclusive content!

Web3 Education Meets Adorable Ghosts was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The world of Web3 has become a massive topic in the last year, but it’s not a new concept. It was coined by Gavin Wood (the co-founder of Ethereum) in 2014. However, it massively increased in popularity in 2021. It seems like my entire Twitter feed has become full of devs discussing Web3 development and promoting their NFTs.

When you know nothing about Web3 at all, it can feel massively overwhelming. Every piece of context refers to a different piece, and before you know it, you’re down a rabbit hole of misunderstanding.

I, myself, am new to this world. A couple of colleagues and I started learning Web3 by building out Codewranglrz, which is an exploratory NFT project!

With that said, everything I am sharing in this post is my personal understanding of definitions and terms from everything I have learned myself over the previous few months. If you feel I’ve gotten something wrong or confusingly explained something, please let me know!

The goal of this post aims to give you clear, concise definitions and explanations of some of the common concepts and terms. I will also provide links to external resources where possible so you can dive more into specific topics!

So, before we get into some of the more specific definitions…

What exactly is “Web3”

In the simplest terms, Web3 refers to applications that are decentralized and run on a blockchain. There are other aspects to it but even that is…clear as mud right?

While we’ll get more into what a blockchain is, the core concept behind web3 as a whole is that everything is distributed over an open peer-to-peer network, as opposed to our current system where everything is stored on private servers.

The concept allows for both a much more open and public network, as well as creating something that is incredibly permanent. One could collapse current applications and data by taking out a server where the information is stored. While good practices would prevent this from wiping something out entirely, things have the potential to be lost.

We’ll discuss more about what the blockchain is in this article, but the concept behind it is that the information exists everywhere there is a node, so there are endless copies of the information. It’s also public so at any point someone can choose to host a node, creating a new copy of the information. Again, this is in very simple terms, but I want to focus on creating a broader concept as opposed to nitpicking the specific details.

So with all this said, let’s dive into some of the common terms and provide some short definitions that will hopefully help you in your journey and serve as somewhat of a “cheat sheet”.

I want to mention that while we define things, it’s likely to bring up new terms. But don’t worry, we’ll be defining them later on in this post. I also provide videos where possible so you can get even more information about the topic beyond what I explain. The videos I will be sharing are by Simply Explained. I am not affiliated with them in any way, but I think the way they explain the topics is incredibly helpful for beginners!

Definitions

NFT: NFT stands for non-fungible token. Fungible means that something is replaceable. The easiest way to imagine this is to think of normal currency — one five-dollar bill is equal to another five-dollar bill.

Therefore, non-fungible means the opposite; every single token is unique and cannot be replaced or exchanged with another token. NFTs live on the blockchain as a contract and store all data related to the NFT, including transaction records, ownership, and all contract details.

A lot of people think of NFTs as digital art, because typically the tokens contain an image!

I know there were a lot of new terms there and we will be getting to them! If you’d like a bit more of a definition, I’d recommend this video!

Blockchain: A blockchain can be thought of as a type of digital ledger that is immutable, meaning it can’t be altered. It’s made up of “blocks”. Each block serves as a sort of “receipt”, containing all the information that was recorded when the block was created (a record of a transaction made).

Each block has a unique hash (id) as well as the hash of the previous block in the chain, which is the principal method of security. The main attraction of a blockchain is that it is decentralized — meaning they are widely distributed and anyone can obtain a copy of the blockchain.

If you’d like to learn even more about blockchains without being totally overwhelmed, I recommend this video.

Smart Contracts: Unlike the previous definitions, the name of this one explains a lot of what it actually means. The “smart” part of the definition refers to code that is self-executed when any specific conditions listed are met or triggered. The contract aspect is exactly what one would expect — people make predetermined agreements which are then “smartly” executed at the appropriate time (via the code). These contracts are what make NFTs possible, as all the actions of minting, selling, and more are a part of the contract.

This video goes into even more details about smart contracts!

Cryptocurrency: A cryptocurrency is a form of digital currency. Its goal is to be a more secure currency, as it is secured with cryptography (hence where it gets its name). A common type of cryptography that you may be familiar with already is encryption! People often are confused about how blockchains and cryptocurrency relate to each other. Cryptocurrency is the asset that the blockchain uses, most commonly referred to as tokens.

Token: The easiest way to think of a token is to think of it as a digital coin; a token represents a unit of cryptocurrency.

IPFS: IPFS stands for “Interplanetary File System” which makes it sounds incredibly futuristic, but that’s because it kind of is. It uses blockchain technology to store information and data, but it’s actually a distributed file system. If you’re familiar with the concept of torrenting, you’ll have a solid understanding of how this system works. In its simplest terms, it’s an open-source peer-to-peer storage system.

You can dive more into IPFS here!

Let’s return to the NFT concept overall. The idea of a token representing a unit of crypto could be confusing, but that’s where the ‘non-fungible’ part comes in. NFTs are all tokens themselves, all holding a value, but unlike a token of something like Bitcoin, no two are alike, meaning they can’t be traded or exchanged! I hope that clarifies it a little bit!

I intend to release more of these posts, next time discussing things like IPFS, chains, and sidechains, as well as specific contract types!

Stay tuned and if you’re interested in even more education NFT material check out the project we’ve been working on! Our first collection, called Boos! is an NFT collection with an educational utility, meaning any NFT holder gains exclusive access to educational material on Web3. We’re minting 500 on April 18th so be sure to check them out!

Web3 Basics Cheat Sheet was originally published in CodeCast on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.