Links are bi-directional. If you link two processes and one of them crashes, the other side will crash too (unless it is trapping exits). A monitor is uni-directional: only the monitoring process will receive notifications about the monitored one. In other words: use links when you want linked crashes, and monitors when you just want to be informed of crashes, exits, and so on.

This is a transcript of a talk given at ElixirDaze and CodeBEAMSF conferences in March of 2018, dealing with supervision trees and with the unexpected.

The choice between maps, structs, and keyword lists, or between string keys and atom keys, is not always clear, and improper decisions can lead to headaches. This article promotes simple guidelines to keep the Elixir programmer out of trouble: Use string-keyed maps for data which has just arrived from an external source. Convert external data to structs as soon as possible. Use ExConstructor or something similar to abstract away the handling of string-keyed maps. Use structs almost everywhere else in your program. Use other atom-keyed maps sparingly. Use keyword lists only to provide arguments to a function. These rules of thumb have improved the quality of our code here at Appcues, and we hope they can help you out too.

Just reading an interesting document wherein elixir takes an important placehttp://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.05976.pdf49 . BPM (business process management), for those who never heard of it, is a sort of Model Driven Development; in BPM you model a workflow / process mostly visual and use this model for execution. So the process that was hidden in your code becomes visible and maintainable for business specialists (I mean specialists that do not code). It can be used together with other MDD parts like BRM (business rules management). Here the rules are extracted out of the code. Even the screen / form builder where you visually compose your forms is a form of MDD. You can choose to create executable models (for example an xml or json that can be interpreted by your code), generate code based on your model or choose a mix. I prefer executable models. Here a company that did a lot of research which names key advantages: https://www.mendix.com/blog/the-power-of-mendix/30 .

In this paper, we propose to rethink the dominantlogic of how to model business processes. We think that an actorbased approach supports in a much better way the fundamentalnature of business processes. We present a proposal for a compilerarchitecture to model and execute business processes as a setof communicating microservices that are hosted on a generalpurpose virtual machine for distributed execution.