Hah, of course 😄I probably should've called that "the functional way" or something. I forgot to mention that Elixir is functional at its core, so there aren't any instance methods on strings or anything else! (it does have modules, though, which can group together related functions)

The Elixir language is cool. It's a functional language, first released in 2011, and gaining traction lately especially in the Ruby community. Elixir's syntax is inspired by Ruby, and its popular web framework Phoenix is reminiscent of Ruby on Rails. Elixir is built upon the Erlang virtual machine, which means it inherits many of the superpowers that Erlang is good at -- namely, building large, scalable, fault-tolerant systems. In Elixir, and in Erlang, threads are extremely lightweight and cheap, so they're used all over the place. The Phoenix web framework was able to manage 2 million websocket connections on a single (very large) server. One of my favorite Elixir features is the pipe operator: # The normal way: String.ends_with?(String.reverse(String.capitalize("freddy")), "F") # The pipe operator way: "freddy" |> String.capitalize() |> String.reverse() |> String.ends_with?("F") My other favorite feature is pattern matching, which, among other things, lets you do things like write multiple versions of a function and let the language figure out which one to call: defmodule Greeter do def hello(:jane), do: "Hello Jane" def hello(name) do "Hello #{name}" end end Pattern matching also works to pick apart data structures, similar to JavaScript's destructuring: {result, value} = {:ok, 2} # result will be :ok # value will be 2 And if you've ever had to work with binary data in a language like C, shifting bits and masking to get at the bits you want, Elixir's binary pattern matching is mindblowing 😄 Here's a nice tutorial on binary pattern matching showing a function to parse PNG files in only about 40 lines of code. I've must say, I haven't spent a ton of time using Elixir and Phoenix yet, but I'm pretty excited about both.

I'd suggest waiting. react-cache is the data loading part and it's not production-ready yet.

I loved Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz, and felt like my design thinking took a great leap forward from that book. Are there any other books or code to read/write that you'd suggest for improving software design skills?

I like the idea of using 2 states, here's my thinking... UI-Router calls them "states" instead of some other name because they do in fact represent different states of your application. I'd say that "being at the dashboard" and "being at the dashboard with verification" are 2 different states, even if they render the same HTML page.

I like the idea of using 2 states, here's my thinking... UI-Router calls them "states" instead of some other name because they do in fact represent different states of your application. I'd say that "being at the dashboard" and "being at the dashboard with verification" are 2 different states, even if they render the same HTML page.

Thanks!

I think you'll have a hard time starting a new "real" project with Angular 2 as it currently stands. The lack of UI framework is only the first hurdle - other important libraries and frameworks will also be missing. Angular 2 is very much still "subject to change"... so any code you write today probably won't work as-is on the final release version. This lack of stability is probably what's keeping people from creating many libraries at this point. I found this: Angular 2 Bootstrap. It's the 2nd hit on google for "angular 2 bootstrap". It only has 15 stars on Github. I don't think you want to build a production app around that yet ;)