Elixir Forum Update 2022 - The $100,000 issue!

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Well done everyone - we did it - with the help of our amazing friends (and more recently in conjunction with Devtalk) we’ve now given away over $100,000 worth of prizes to our members! As far as we know no other programming related forum has ever done anything like this!

Want more cool stats? How‘s this: the forum turned 5 last year and we’ve now sent out 5M emails and served over a staggering 50M pages! :048:

Elixir continues to buck the trend and YOU have been an integral part of this. Community matters - it’s why we uphold high standards and it’s why our community is so diverse, passionate and just all round awesome! It’s not uncommon for people to comment how great and how welcoming the Elixir community is, and it’s crystal clear why - it’s because of you and your positive contributions, camaraderie and outlook - so well done each and every one of you!! :purple_heart:

Many of you will have noticed that we haven’t been resting on our laurels on the forum front and have been busy beavering away on sister sites :024: We launched Devtalk about 18 months ago and the new Erlang Forums towards the end of last year. This interconnected trio can help us with longer term goals such as spreading the word about Elixir and Erlang in the wider dev space, helping Erlang and helping bring the BEAM world even closer together, and serving as a good spring board for potential future projects, like proper meaningful benchmarks (the type where Elixir/Erlang would excel!) and our custom community platform (more on that in a bit!)

You’ve also been busy working on awesome stuff yourselves - from Elixir entering the machine learning space with Nx, to Elixir on the desktop to a new isomorphic framework that can be used alongside Phoenix - and much much more! See these and other most talked about libraries from last year here.

While the last 5 years certainly have been productive and fun, the next 5 have the potential to be even more exciting - and we can’t wait to see what the future holds and what you’ll all be up to!

If you’re wondering what we’ve got in store for you this year, wonder no more, more cool stuff of course! :003:

2022 Giveaways!

For those of you who want even more chances to win, we have similar giveaways on Devtalk and the Erlang Forums too!

2022 Discounts!!

We’ve got some super discounts lined up for you again this year:

  • 35% off any ebook published by PragProg!
    Simply use our Devtalk coupon code devtalk.com

  • 35% off any ebook, print book or video published by Manning!
    Simply use our Devtalk coupon code devtalk.com

  • 10% off ElixirCasts… for life!
    Simply use coupon code elixirforum

  • 20% off ANY Pragmatic Studio course!
    Simply use our Devtalk coupon code devtalk.com

  • 10% off AppSignal… for 12 months!
    Simply use coupon code elixirforum

Members of the Month is back!

We’ve been running an annual Members of the Year for a few years now but it actually started life as Members of the Month - and we miss it! So this year we’re going to do our best to get back to a monthly version. To help make this more manageable we’ll restrict it to two a month and give away the remainder of books ad-hoc throughout the year. Perhaps we can rope some of you in to help with the selection process too!?

Book clubs!

We have a fair number of books to give away as part of our book club initiative on Devtalk - and we’d love to get more Elixir book clubs and journals going! If you’re interested in taking part please PM @AstonJ (if you can get a group of friends or colleagues to join you even better!) Just let us know which topics interest you and we’ll see what we can come up with :smiley:

New ‘How…’ section

Ever wondered how to create or do something in Elixir? Or what some terminology means? Maybe you want to solidify what you’ve learnt by explaining things to others? If so this new section could be just what you’re looking for!

If you’re familiar with Eli5 (Explain like I’m 5) then this is a little bit like that, though that’s just one aspect of the idea. Our aim is to go further than just explaining things to newbies - we’re hoping the section can serve as a great place to garner opinions on how people do all sorts of things. If you have a curious mind, we think you’ll like this section!

Here are some examples of the type of threads we could use it for:

HWY Explain:
HWY Create:
HWY Tackle:
HWY Approach:
HDY… (How do you…)
HAY… (How are you…)

The first one is like Eli5, or more specifically, like our How would you explain Phoenix Contexts to a newbie? thread, and the others are for when you might be curious how someone might create, tackle or approach something. Curious how people aim to build Phoenix apps in 2022? Or what their approach might be to microservices or Umbrellas? This section is great for all of that!

With the Elixir universe having expanded quite a bit in the last few years the section could prove to be extremely useful, and since there are often multiple ways to achieve the same result we could see some very interesting (and enlightening) discussions!

See the section info for details.

2021 Members of the Year!

With us fast approaching 20K members it’s becoming difficult to whittle this list down to just 50, so please forgive us if we missed you! We’ve done our best to select based on the most active posters, those with the most accepted solutions, and ‘likes’ - over the last 12 months.

If you’re named here thank you and well done - and please read the bit at the end as we have an ebook for you!

@03juan

@al2o3cr

@APB9785

@axelson

@benwilson512

@cenotaph

@cmo

@derek-zhou

@dimitarvp

@dom

@dorgan

@eksperimental

@Exadra37

@f0rest8

@Fl4m3Ph03n1x

@fuelen

@gregvaughn

@hauleth

@ityonemo

@John-Goff

@kip

@kokolegorille

@LostKobrakai

@lud

@Marcus

@mcrumm

@mhanberg

@michallepicki

@moogle19

@mudasobwa

@Nicd

@NobbZ

@outlog

@patrickdm

@PJUllrich

@Qqwy

@RudManusachi

@ruslandoga

@sasajuric

@Sebb

@sfusato

@shd42

@sorentwo

@stefanchrobot

@tadasajon

@thomas.fortes

@tomkonidas

@trisolaran

@voltone

@wojtekmach

:041: :041: :041: :041: :041:

As a thank you, we have an ebook for each of our winners! We have 25 books from PragProg and 25 from Manning so if you are listed above, please PM @AstonJ with your first choice from one publisher and your second choice from the other - we’ll then allocate these on a first come first serve basis :023: (They don’t have to be an Elixir book either, they can be any book so long as they are published by either PragProg or Manning.)

Our plans for 2022 and beyond

It’s been a busy few years and we’ve got a lot done - but we’re not finished yet!

Getting involved in projects like this is rarely just about setting up a forum, it’s about community, helping it and supporting its growth in a positive way - and while forums have served us as well as they can for decades there’s now a whole new world of tech at our fingertips (like Elixir!) that allows us to push the boundaries of what online spaces can (and maybe should) be, and that’s what our next big project will be - a custom community platform - built with Elixir/Erlang of course! :003:

However we’re not going to rush things, and through the first half of the year at least we’ll need to continue the groundwork needed so that we’re in good stead for the future (though this mostly applies to Devtalk and the Erlang Forums since they are still relatively young). We may even take some time out to catch up on some reading and making one or two fun projects along the way, particularly as we’re dying to put some LiveView into production!

In Closing

The years seem to be flying by and while we have all crammed a lot in in that time, this really is just the beginning - and we hope you’re equally hyped about what comes next for you, Elixir, and the rest of the BEAM world… because something tells us that whatever it is, will be even more spectacular :sparkles:

Wishing you all a happy, healthy and prosperous 2022! :purple_heart:

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This community is one of the best (if not the best) I’ve encountered in the last few years. Incredibly helpful, elegant and respectful. Even when some posters forgot to be respectful themselves.

And let’s not forget those who work behind the scene. The service providers of the ecosystem; unseen but nevertheless extremely important (sysadmins and alike)

Thanks to everyone keeping the value of this forum on such high level!

Ps. Like and subscribe if you want me in the list next year (influencer style!)

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Yeah huge props to @AstonJ. I’ve been a member of my fair share of communities over the years and he (and the rest of the moderation team) really do a fantastic job. Here’s to another 5 great years!

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A big thank you to all the admins, mods, and users for making Elixir Forum the wonderful, helpful, and respectful community that it is! :heart:

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I certainly hope this is some kind of metaverse where I can go to the bakery, order a sausage roll with tomato sauce and sit down with Robert Virding to chat about Lisp and his favourite cat videos.

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Looks like it’s working Bart :003:

Thank you also for the kind comments - it means a lot to us on the team! <3

You yourself are a prime example of why the forum and the community is so awesome Ben - you have been here since day one and still, even after all these years, you are often one of the first to respond to people’s threads and you rank joint second (with Koko) for having the most accepted solutions :041: I have no doubt that anyone who has googled more than a handful of Elixir related questions will have come across one of your posts over the years. This community is awesome because we have people like you in it <3

Thanks for saying that Philipp - pat yourself on the back too because you’re just as much a part of why that is being one of our longest standing members :smiley:

It wouldn’t surprise me if Robert is working on something better than a metaverse :lol:

Seriously tho, if you like what we’ve done around here you may well love this new platform! :robot:

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This happens rather frequently at work. Someone will start looking for an answer to a specific question and then find that Ben has already answered it here :smiley:

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A big thank you to everyone and to the community!!!

Some people say that language X Y and Z have feature A B or C, that language (insert name here) is better because of it, etc etc etc…
But those people miss the point imo. Elixir is growing because it focuses on the thing that matters the most - the people using it, the community.

No other language supports its community as openly as Elixir does (afaik) and this is the main reason I would recommend Elixir to anyone - if you have a question, there is a good chance someone will at least help you find your way.

This is the main driving factor for me personally - the feeling I am not alone. The feeling someone out there is willing to help. You can’t put a price on that.

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I love this place. Thank you for everything.

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Appreciation for the dedication of the team, happy as members, I like to read and follow the contents of the discussion. Thank you AstonJ for your welcome note when I became a member a few years ago.

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That’s definitely a strong part of why it’s a good language to learn – and it has such a strong community because it’s a good language in the first place. Maybe not for each and every purpose imaginable, but certainly for its intended uses. All the same goes for Ruby too IMHO, and probably many others I’m not as familiar with.

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Hello, Ivan from Bonfire here :wave:. We are building an open source, modular and federated social network using Elixir and the PETALS* stack, and we would like to invite you to consider it for the Elixir community :slight_smile:

Our goal is to create a place for communities to thrive which they can shape according to their specific needs and visions - that would not lock the community or its members into a walled garden, but would enable them to federate with other communities at their own pace, thanks to ActivityPub library.

Bonfire’s value proposition is to empower communities to have control over all features and UX: from schemas to logic to appearance. Admins and users can configure their app in extensive detail, they can pick and choose what extensions to use, and developers can create or customise existing ones to provide custom experiences.

Bonfire has a very small core app, that among other things, takes care of hooking together all the extensions (packaged as mix libraries) and configuration defined by the community: typically it includes the most common social features and a granular permission system. We are also making progress with several extensions to expand on the social network with features like a Kanban extension, an offers/needs bullettin and a set of features to fight online disinformation.

We’re working hard to release a beta version of Bonfire, and it would be truly amazing for the Elixir community to get involved in taking it for a spin and providing feedback to further improve and evolve it. If you are interested we are happy to discuss futher (and even set up a call if that helps) and help you set up a test instance to explore what we’ve got so far.

Thanks for the amazing community you build and nurture.

*Postgres, Elixir, TailwindCSS, AlpineJS, LiveView, Surface

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I am very curious to the plans for the custom community platform. Think there’s not yet more information available on it, right? As it happens I was just posting along related lines on the SocialHub community forum about Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SocialHub is a community dedicated to the Fediverse open standards). There’s a broad need for community supporting tools, esp. on the Fediverse, and I’d love to see Bonfire be a foundation to those.

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I’ve joined today and I noticed that the welcome message at the top of the forum has an outdated link to the 2021 version of this post.

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Thanks, updated :smiley:
(I thought I had already done it :icon_redface:)

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I made it! Thanks to all my followers, and my mom and dad who always kept believing in me :wink:

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