Elixir Forum Update 2023: Celebrating Ten Years of Elixir!

[mindok]

I first came across Elixir somewhere around late 2016 from a mostly .Net background. I’d previously been involved in at least 3 codebases over the prior 10 years where attempts at handling modestly concurrent usage, while ultimately successful (in two out of the three, anyway), involved many late nights and grey hairs trying to trace subtle bugs. I’d also started dabbling in Ruby (& Rails) & JS front end frameworks to see where the industry was going.

I can’t recall how I eventually came across Elixir, but right from the get-go it made sense. The more I dug into the stack, the more it made sense, along the lines of:

@kwando

To me Elixir feels like an little island of sanity in the chaos that is software engineering today, it is home.

It’s quite remarkable how far it has come since then, particularly as it has been relatively “under the radar”. Phoenix LiveView has changed the course of my career. Looking at all the JS front ends I had lost all hope in putting together any kind of highly interactive web application without a whole bunch of capital to fund a large development team. LiveView lets a very small team go a very long way quite quickly. Elixir & Erlang lets LiveView do what it needs to do in a scalable, performant, stable way.

There are obviously numerous other significant contributions to the ecosystem - I look through my mix files and see high performance JSON parsing, math expression parsing, digraph handling, low level database drivers, topology processing, Rust bindings, job processing, GraphQL bindings, resource frameworks and so on - all first class.

While the technology is really great, it’s important to reflect on the team that has put it together and the community that supports it. It’s amazing to see the calibre of people willing to give their time, and in particular to step back and explain the “why”, not just the “what”. And the answers are often very pragmatic and based on hard-won experience.

Furthermore, the leaders of the community have done an exemplary job of leadership in the sense that acceptable behaviour is well-defined and when behaviour falls below what’s acceptable, it’s called out. It takes courage to do, and I know it can be tiring and thankless at times, but that’s what it takes to build a community like this. As a result, we have a welcoming and generous community.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling on! Heartfelt thanks to all involved, and I’m looking forward to seeing what the next 10 years brings!

[sbuttgereit]

I wanted to take a moment to express my heartfelt thanks to a number of people involved in bring the tools that I’ve been using for the past year to realize a project which for me has some personal importance and which will continue to consume my time for a while yet.

I’ll start at the beginning and offer thanks to Robert Virding, Mike Williams, and the late Joe Armstrong and all of those involved in advancing Erlang over the years, and to those that continue to do so, for bringing a model of computing which made the difficult problems of concurrency and resiliency much more manageable.

Next my thanks to José Valim for 1) having the foresight to see that the problems solved by Erlang were applicable to a much broader range of applications than just the communication oriented applications where Erlang was typically used; 2) for creating a language which gave non-Erlang developers a gateway into the world of Erlang/OTP using familiar idioms and semantics; and 3) his contributions to the ecosystem of tools and libraries which are expected of a modern development paradigm.

I want to thank those that participate in the Elixir community and the broader community focused on the technologies ultimately supported on the BEAM. Not only to those answering questions, giving opinions, and being receptive to discussing ideas, but to those across the entire ecosystem who take their valuable time to support each other. For example one aspect of the community with which I am most impressed is when I see Erlang core team members participating and offering their expertise in the Elixir Forum; it speaks incredibly well of the broader ecosystem and gives me great comfort that the whole ecosystem is healthy and focused on our shared purposes.

I know I’ve left many important contributors out, both in spirit and in sweat to the remarkable achievement that is Elixir, it’s ecosystem, and the broader Erlang ecosystem upon which it’s built; but I am truly thankful to everyone that has contributed to the tools I now use everyday.

Steve

[cjbottaro]

We’d love for you to join us in celebrating ten years of Elixir by sharing your own personal story, perhaps taking a moment to mention anyone who’s made an impact on you or your journey

The community (this forum in particular) has been awesome.

I remember one of the very first posts I made here got deleted… It was some negativity regarding the Erlang syntax. Instead of making me feel bad or demonizing me, @AstonJ explained to me that the Elixir people and Erlang people are friends the former wouldn’t be possible without the latter.

So many years later, here I am, still posting and a huge fan of BEAM and OTP!

[sergio]

Elixir came into my life in 2016 as well.

I was looking for a path forward after MeteorJS left me stranded. I didn’t know where to take my career. One day I was on my random throwaway Reddit account, and a total stranger just gifted me his Orlando ElixirConf ticket for free. I was in bad financial shape back then, with a young family. I was the sole breadwinner.

So my wife and kids and I got in our car and drove up to Orlando, the rest is history.

During the first months of using Elixir in my free time the thing that really stood out to me was Jose and Chris’ energy. They were here on the site, answering just total noob questions and taking feedback very gracefully from the incoming devs. Of course these days they have taken a bit of a step back and that’s totally understandable but man those days were crazy!

Second thing that stood out from the Elixir community, you would get answers and suggestions from true titans of our profession. People like @joeerl would just casually stop by and recommend things. (holy shit!)

I don’t see stuff like that happening in other programming communities I lurk in. Elixir is quite unique in that regard. The reason why I post so much here is that people like @joeerl and others (too many to count) inspire me to teach what I know about Elixir and grow the community. Big shout out to @kokolegorille and @dimitarvp.

[Exadra37]

What a big surprise and honor for me to be again in top contributors for 2022

@elixirforum

Whatever it is, whatever brought you to Elixir and whatever keeps you here - please let us know - we’d love to hear!

It was a talk from @bapti, at an Edinburgh meetup in 2016, that drew me into Elixir. In fact after the talk I was so excited that on the train back home I jumped immediately in Elixir. What got me excited on his talk was when he mentioned the drop of serving the traffic from around 100/150ms with DotNet to around 20/ 25ms with Elixir and without spikes at rush hours, followed by all the other distributed, concurrent and fault-tolerant characteristics of the BEAM that he also explained and contributed to boost my excitement about the language.

I was literally shocked that Erlang has solved a long time ago what a lot of languages were trying to solve during the last decade, concurrency without the complexity of semaphores, locks, etc… My excitement was so big that I even forgive it for not being properly typed (I hate to discover errors at runtime that should be caught by a compiler) and parked my intentions on pursuing Rust as my language of choice.

I was never able to convince my employer on the time to use Elixir, despite it be an excellent fit for our problems. I then tried to find a job in Elixir, but never succeeded, maybe because I am self-taught developer that lacks the knowledge to reply that algorithm questions they love to ask on interviews in a Google and Facebook fashion. Anyway, Elixir never died inside of me and I made some pets apps to keep me on the loop, some of them I have published online at video-hub.exadra37.com and taskit.exadra37.com. My dream of working in a big Elixir project is coming true, as I decided to join that dream with my dream of building a SaaS.

My joy and enthusiasm of working in Elixir is augmented with this excellent forum and community. I was baffled to see that @josevalim, the creators of Erlang, Phoenix, the authors of several books and libs were all here talking with us as if they were just one more mere developer of this community. This willingness of them in participating in our topics really helped me to stay, because I was a little disappointed to see that Elixir hadn’t much traction on Twitter and Stackoverflow on that time.

What made me click into programming in Elixir, a functional programming language, was the book from @pragdave, because without it functional wasn’t clicking on my head. I really loved his approach to make us switch from the object orientated mental model to the functional one.

So, I really want to give a big thank to all of you:

• @josevalim
• Creators of Erlang - @joeerl (RIP), @rvirding and @???
• @chrismccord
• The core teams of Erlang, Elixir, Phoenix, Ecto, Plug, Ash and all other libraries we use.
• Books/Courses Authors - @pragdave, @sasajuric, @mikeclark and many others I don’t recall now the handlers and names.
• The community for being so helpful and transparent for when Elixir is or not a good fit.
• @AstonJ for creating and maintaining this community.
• All moderators for helping on keeping this community healthy and organized.
• And a special thanks to @dimitarvp for following closely everything I post.

P.S: I would love to write more but my wife keeps calling me to help her

[stefanchrobot]

I remember one of my colleagues rambling about OOP, the issues he had with developing concurrent apps with JRuby and that we should all be using Erlang. He was going to attend an Elixir conference in a couple of weeks. While we had no idea what that really was, big part of our team used their learning budget to join the first edition of ElixirConf EU in 2015. And that’s where my Elixir journey started… No wonder, given the roster of the speakers.

I fell in love with Elixir and the Erlang VM and took my time to learn it at my own pace by reading Programming Elixir, then Elixir in Action and only after that moving on to learn Phoenix.

Thank you for awarding me with the MOTY 2022 title! I really appreciate that. I’ve been away from the forum since December due to the fact that my day job no longer involves Elixir. But I do have a non-trivial side-project that runs happily on the latest and greatest Elixir and Phoenix It always feels great whenever I have an opportunity to work on that codebase! I hope to be able to find more time to hang around here.

It’s great to be a part of such a great community! Huge thank you to everyone involved!

[03juan]

@elixirforum

We’d love for you to join us in celebrating ten years of Elixir by sharing your own personal story, perhaps taking a moment to mention anyone who’s made an impact on you or your journey

Congratulations on a fantastic year for the forum and such a great 10-year journey for Elixir!

I was first impacted by and drawn to Elixir from the talk on The Soul of Erlang and Elixir by @sasajuric. Coming from building a Rails system suffering from the typical performance and scaling issues, it got me excited for a platform where all the hard parts about concurrency and large-scale distributed systems were part of its DNA.

Then I started looking into the Phoenix and LiveView framework and, after getting excited by @chrismccord’s keynote Interactive Apps without Javascript and @SophieDeBenedetto’s talk Beyond LiveView, I pushed my first commit in October 2020 for an in-house B2B app to help my clients manage complex construction projects.

Being the lead product manager and sole developer, I give my heartfelt and sincere thanks for all the hard work the Elixir community has put into the amazing tools I use every day:

Phoenix, LiveView, Ecto, @zachdaniel’s Ash, LiveBook, @kip’s Cldr, and many more large and small.

And last but not least all the great people in this fantastic forum!

Thank you for naming me in the 2022 MOTY. I unfortunately got massively swamped with work early last year and haven’t made as much of a contribution here as I would have liked, but hope to remedy that soon!