Monthly Wrap Up - August

Summary

• Matt presented at ElixirConf 🗣️
• Local time hook ⏰
• Use Docker for a local Postgres 🐳
• New recipe: NPM 👨‍🍳
• Petal Pro feedback 📢
• In progress: Recipe Center
• Matt’s Petal Assist sessions still ongoing for Petal Pro buyers 🛟
• Join our Discord community

Matt presented at ElixirConf 🗣️

Due to the time difference between the US and Australia, this was prerecorded, but I think Matt presented well. At the time of writing this blog, there’s no video just yet, but I will update this blog with the video link once that goes live.

Local time hook ⏰

Allows UTC dates and times to be shown in the user’s local timezone (using Javascript). Supports “time_ago” formatting (eg. “in 1 month”).

Use Docker for a local Postgres 🐳

If your system doesn’t have Postgres you can use docker-compose to run it in a container (saves you having to install it).

New recipe: NPM 👨‍🍳

We understand that some people need to use third-party Javascript libraries and prefer to use NPM to manage them over CDNs. This recipe will get you up and running with NPM quickly.

Petal Pro feedback 📢

We sent out an anonymous survey to Petal Pro buyers and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. This feedback is helping shape the direction of Petal Pro, so we appreciate everyone who has left us feedback so far and if you haven’t yet shared something but would like to, the link is below.

Leave feedback here

In progress: Recipe Center

As we add more and more functionality listed in our roadmap, we want to ensure the boilerplate remains lean. For this to happen, we will be relying more and more on recipes, allowing developers to pull in only the functionality they need.

Currently, recipes exist as git branches and are slightly difficult to apply. Luckily, we have found a way to make it much easier to apply recipes to your project - you won’t need to even touch git (say what???). You eventually won’t even need to upgrade Petal Pro to get new recipes as they will be loaded from petal.build via an API. You simply access a route and see a searchable list of available recipes, complete with thumbnail, description and diff showing exactly what changes this recipe will make. With the click of a button, the diff will be applied to your codebase.

This way, we can improve your development experience in a less obtrusive way. While a member you will have access to an ever-growing library of recipes. It might be a new design for a login screen, or it might be some functionality like live uploading a file to S3.

Eventually we’d even like members to submit their own recipes and set their own price. This way you might be able to make some extra money on a feature you created in one of your projects.

Thanks - see you next month!