As a fun task, I relearned first year pure functional programming using Elm. To generate something more useful and exciting than YATA (Yet Another Todo App), I decided to come up with a simple calculator for figuring out much it will cost per day to operate a Redis Cluster on AWS Elastic Cache for a given size + network speed.

Take Aways

  • Its amazing how much one can forget from 1st year CS
  • Even coming from writing functional-ish all day at work, pure functional programing is hard (really wished for an optional index param when iterating through a list)
  • Elm’s documentation code really be fleshed out to cover more than how to get things started and how the language compares to JS
  • Elm’s compilation errors were really clear and useful (especially in VS Code)

Feel free to check it out at: https://nexus-uw.github.io/elastic-cache-calculator/

Source code is available at: https://github.com/nexus-uw/elastic-cache-calculator