Three years ago I started learning Elixir, two years ago I had my company go all in with this tech, now powering most of our infrastructure and today I’m mentoring one of our engineers to the arts of the BEAM.

In retrospect it’s been a shot in the dark and quite the gamble to bet on such a new language, but the ecosystem has been growing at tremendous pace and my productivity has gone through the roof. We’ve had a productive language, a modular web framework, a state-of-the-art database interface, a GraphQL server and we’re experimenting with embedded development and breaking out of the Javascript shackles.

But I’m not here to declaim the virtues of Elixir as a technology, but to give a small token of appreciation to the community, which has been the friendliest I’ve had the pleasure to work with. There’s a lot of excitement, people getting interested and tons of work has been made to lower the barriers of entry, and this forum has been instrumental to help out new developers coming to terms with the paradigm shift of using a functional language.

I would like to reserve a word for @josevalim which, while he has delegated much core development and libraries to other members, he’s been a great front of the community as a whole, and I deeply appreciate when I open a Github issue on a smaller project and there he is helping me debug my problem. I swear he is everywhere

And of course thanks to Joe, Robert and Mike for creating the underpinnings of the BEAM and enabling this ecosystem to exist in the first place.

Personally, I’m excited to see where do we go from here!