HACKER Q&A
📣 jamil7

App ideas to learn Phoenix / Elixir


I've been wanting to learn Phoenix / Elixir for forever basically and have never gotten the chance. This year is the year. Most of my side-projects are small, single-user focused apps but to learn and take advantage of Phoenix I want to focus on something social, collaborative, real-time maybe. Any ideas for something fun HN? Maybe a game? I'll probably write the client for mobile/iOS if that helps but I'm open to anything really.


  👤 rakoo Accepted Answer ✓
The fediverse desperately needs a global search engine. By design there are thousands of instances, each with thousands of accounts on average. Your instance only knows about the instances it is connected to, and nothing about the others. As such small, personal instances are penalized because they might not be super connected.

A single entry point will give a better view about what's happening on the whole fediverse, and potentially accounts to follow. Building such an entry point will require a stack that can handle asynchronous jobs run in parallel, an area where the Erlang platform can truly shine. Give it a live view with Phoenix/LiveView and it's gonna be a banger.


👤 chaabani
I’ve been in your situation where I also wanted to learn Elixir/Phoenix and I fortunately had an idea of a web app that was a nice fit and I am releasing it this week.

So I suggest to just go with any project, for example just duplicate something that already exists (twitter, etc). This way, when you find an idea you really like, you’ll be able to build it quicker.

And if I really have to suggest an idea, I think some project management or collaboration tool is a nice fit. You can build it so that it helps you organize your projects or collaborate with your friends, and then see if it may be helpful for other people too.


👤 randomcatuser
Ahh!! A forum? Where you can showcase your project and ask for help on it lol.

I really want a place to chat with people about what they're building +or thinking of building!! Like product hunt but for prelaunch/hobbies


👤 crockwave
I like this project, which demonstrates Phoenix, Elixir and LiveView capabilities and also provides you a useful Kanban style development tool. It provides well organized code and a variety of useful database interaction examples.

https://github.com/seb3s/kandesk


👤 bananadonkey
Chat app/Slack clone is good material for learning a range of Elixir concepts.

👤 ttymck
Not exactly a game, but I made a poker chip tracker for this exact purpose[1]. It would be really interesting to see someone clone it, and see the differences!

Sorry if the article is a bit hard to follow, I have been meaning to re-write it.

[1] https://tylerkontra.com/posts/rewriting-a-phoenix-app-to-lea...


👤 robbs
Make a simple game. Games are fun and keeping it simple allows you to focus on learning. I made a multiplayer, last player standing trivia game to try out LiveView and it was great.

👤 dugmartin
A Real-time collaborative Wordle clone? Or maybe a turn-based one where you can see the other players keystrokes in real-time but can’t alter them?

👤 visox

👤 digianarchist
Pragmatic Studio has some good courses.

👤 kuranai
Maybe a planning poker site? Should benefit from Live-View and presence features from Phoenix.

👤 codegeek
Build a Pictionary game.