The Bell was a COVID-19-inspired social-distancing code/art project I created and maintained from March until October of 2020.

Over the life of the project, The Bell was clicked over 4K times by ringers around the world.

Elixir, Phoenix, WebSockets, PostgreSQL, Gigalixir

The purpose of this project was to feel connected with other people, build something calming that defied simple explanations, and direct visitors to a charity supporting relief efforts.

The idea chose my stack: I wanted real-time, virtually unlimited connections, and Elixir with WebSockets exists for this use case. I chose Gigalixir because it offers platform-as-a-service without limitations on some core Elixir features.

This project challenged me as a designer and as a programmer. How to I make the bell look and feel amazing? I felt success was binary: it was either engaging or it was not. My takeaway is that I enjoy building products that follow my imagination.

To start your Phoenix server:

• Install dependencies with mix deps.get
• Create and migrate your database with mix ecto.setup
• Install Node.js dependencies with cd assets && npm install
• Start Phoenix endpoint with mix phx.server

Now you can visit localhost:4000 from your browser.

$ mix test

MIT.

Thank you to everyone who rang The Bell.