Hi all,

I’m going to be giving a little 20 minute tech talk at my company which uses .NET C# across all of our 100ish size IT team. I’m a big time Elixir/Erlang/OTP fan and I want to spread the good word to my team.

My question is, as a .NET tech stack company, what should my biggest talking points be? I don’t want to do just a 20 minute lecture about what Elixir, functional programming, concurrency is, I want to try and structure this talk in such a way that it plants the seeds of perhaps doing some new projects in Elixir, starting a cool internal Elixir dev team! Because finding Elixir work is tough so I want to try and make the Elixir work for myself.

Fortunately the place I’m has a quite mature, modern tech stack. We only have one legacy monolith. So there’s loads of similarities between our services that we’d write in .NET/Elixir. They’re all microservices, either APIs or Workers or both, they all communicate with each other, most often using Rabbit, all deployed using Kubernetes/Docker, all that cool stuff.

The problem is we’re a company based in one country, perhaps a million customers, and our business model (insurance) doesn’t provide scenarios that play to Elixir’s strengths: massive concurrency, fault tolerance, extremely high availability, etc. So I’m probably fighting an uphill battle here, why would the company create an application in a programming language that none of the other team know.

But I do believe that even if you’re not expecting 100 requests a second, Elixir is still worth working with.

So my plan is to give them a whistlestop tour of Functional programming, talk about processes, supervision trees, fault tolerance, basically a mini Joe Armstrong talk. Then I’ll show some LiveBook code samples showing cool pattern matching, metaprogramming, spawning 1 million processes live, etc.

Then some magic words to say to suddenly free me from Microsoft ecosystem and finally give me commercial Elixir experience! Or perhaps a demonstration of something, some LiveView app?

Cheers all!