Understanding and Utilizing GenStage for Twitter API Consumption

GenStage is a centerpiece within Elixir for developing concurrent applications, especially when it comes to handling back-pressure gracefully. The content delves into the core components of GenStage: Producers, Consumers, and Producer-Consumers, clarifying their roles and showing how to implement them. For example, a Producer can be designed to fetch data from Twitter API based on certain criteria, dispatching events to its Consumers. These Consumers, in turn, process the events and save them to a database. Throughout, the author uses the case of consuming tweets mentioning the singer Anitta to illustrate a practical application. Attention is also given to concurrency, enabling multiple Consumers to work in parallel and handle data in batches efficiently. The mechanism of back-pressure is crucial to prevent overwhelming the system by controlling the demand from Consumers and is explained with analogies to make the concept clearer. This practical guide extends to showing how to set up the GenStage pipeline on application start-up, creating a system that keeps processing tweets in real-time.