The Big Nerd Ranch Blog

Database constraints are a great tool for preventing bad data. Here’s how to use them without causing frustration for yourself or your users.

Capturing valid data—whether usernames, purchases, or reservations—is a key part of writing good web applications. Here’s how to make your database work for you.

Elixir’s IO lists are one of the secrets to blazing response times in the Phoenix framework. Here’s how.

Erlang’s IO Lists enable Elixir to very efficiently write to files and sockets. But do you know how to use them?

Unicode strings are multi-layered things, which makes comparing them, traversing them and transforming them a bit more complicated than with ASCII. Learn how to wrangle them correctly in Elixir.

You may know that Elixir has great Unicode support. But how? Let’s see how Unicode and UTF-8 actually work and how Elixir is able to handle any string you give it.