Hologram Website

01. What does it do, and who uses it?

It's where people come to learn Hologram. There's the documentation, a blog with the release notes, a reference of the Elixir and Erlang functions that run in the browser, a few demos, the newsletter and waiting list signups, and the Showcase you're reading now.

Most visitors are Elixir developers, either trying Hologram for the first time or looking something up in the docs.

02. Why did you pick Hologram? Did you consider anything else?

It's Hologram's own website, so it was always going to be built with Hologram, and I didn't consider anything else. It turned out to be the most useful choice too. Every page I add to this site is a test of the framework, and a lot of fixes in Hologram started as something that annoyed me here.

03. Which parts of Hologram does it rely on most, and for what?

Pages and layouts for the whole site, that's 62 pages on two layouts. Components for everything shared, from the headings to the docs sidebar. Actions and commands for the forms: the newsletter, the two waiting lists and the Showcase form all check what you type in the browser and save it on the server. The Space Invaders and bouncing ball demos run entirely in the browser on chained actions. And a bit of JavaScript interop, to start the videos in the release announcements.

• Pages
• Layouts
• Components
• Actions
• Commands
• Forms
• JavaScript Interop

04. What was hard, or almost made you stop?

Nothing made me want to stop, but this is where I hit Hologram's rough edges first. In 2025 bitstrings were very slow in the browser on large pages, so the mobile menu got a small JavaScript workaround. That's fixed now.

05. What do you wish Hologram had?

The local-first data layer I'm working on now. Every form on this site saves its data through a command I wrote by hand, and that's the code I'd most like to stop writing.

06. Anything else you'd like people to know?

The site has 96 browser tests that go through its pages and forms, so I don't click through it by hand before a deploy.