Border plasma, and a busy month on Petal Components
Since the playground shipped we have pushed nine releases in about a month. A glowing new border effect, a searchable select that fought back, and a lesson about z-index I should have known.
I'm Nicolas. I co-founded Petal, where we build developer tools for the Elixir community. Our open source components have been downloaded more than 1.4 million times and run in production at companies like Woolworths. I also co-founded Wicked Sites, a studio building for Australian businesses, and these days I spend a lot of my time on AI and how it changes the way we build. Before all of this there were global startup events, a pandemic-born kindness marketplace, and a stint at the UN.





Since the playground shipped we have pushed nine releases in about a month. A glowing new border effect, a searchable select that fought back, and a lesson about z-index I should have known.
We built a place where you can see every Petal component, dial in your own colours and radius, and watch the whole library restyle live. All in LiveView.
Petal Pro started as a Phoenix boilerplate with auth and billing baked in. v4 rethinks it around how people actually build now, with an agent in the loop from the first commit.
I don't think of myself as a full-time developer. I think of myself as a technologist who ships. Here's what AI changed about the day-to-day, and what it didn't.




