If you’ve ever used the dbg module in Erlang you’ve seen the esoteric names of the functions it exports. I recently watched Jeffery Utter’s excellent ElixirConf talk on Debugging Live Systems on the BEAM. In the talk when he covers the dbg:tpl/3 function he guesses that it might stand for "tuple". This reminded me that I didn’t know what most of the functions names in the dbg module stood for, even though I learned how to use dbg years ago. This got me searching for the meanings behind the dbg function names.

I’ve posted several off-topic blog posts this year and this is another one. Perhaps it is more relevant than the others as I list the issues with KaiOS software and the software limitations of my feature phone.

I’ve been using an Alcatel Go Flip 2 as my only phone for about a year and a half now. I feel like leaving my smartphone behind was the right choice and feel like my life is better as a result. I’ve published two previous articles on my move from a high end smartphone to a cheap feature phone. In this blog post I review the hardware and software I now use on my feature phone.

I use Erlang and Elixir regularly, and I often get hung up on the differences between Erlang records and Elixir structs. Both serve the same purpose most of the time but are implemented differently.

In this blog post I will document the differences between these two constructs.