I’m Steve (from Des Moines, IA, USA) - I’m just an enthusiast. Learning about software development and fantasy football are my two passions. I heard about Phoenix and as I learned more about Elixir, I realized that Elixir and Phoenix are well-suited for a lot of fantasy football-related ideas I’ve had.
So a month or so ago I started working on an auction application to replace the auction app at MyFantasyLeague (MFL is the BEST fantasy football site, but the auction app is still a work in progress), part of which has involved starting to write an Elixir wrapper for the MFL API. That has been a real pleasure. Once I got started, I was very excited to hear about LiveView, because I often give up on projects when they get to the point where I would need to introduce a JavaScript framework for them to really be more than a toy. One of the great joys of just being a hobbyist is being able to just say no to JavaScript if you want.
As I learned about LiveView, I also learned about drab, which I have been using to build the auction application. drab is great! I have a rich application with no compromises, without writing a single line of JavaScript. It has made a huge difference in what I can accomplish while still having fun, and I am not really even using its more powerful features.
Before Elixir I built various things in Ruby/Rails for fun. I work in the electric utility industry, where I have used R quite a bit at times. I’ve used Python, but it never really clicked. I was also really enjoying learning Elm as another way to avoid JavaScript until drab came into my life and enabled me to do everything I wanted in one language. Makes me wonder if I would like Haskell.
My advice to others who aren’t professional/experienced developers would be to find a meaningful project you can use to learn that doesn’t use Phoenix or Ecto. It is easy to start there, especially with a Rails background, and fall into the trap of expecting a certain level of magic that a) may not be there, and b) you might not want to use anyway. I very briefly played around with both, and then set them aside to build my first real application. Once the “business” logic was well along, I noticed that, a) Phoenix and Ecto felt like small details; just a way to present/persist the data I had already figured out how to work with, and b) I had been forced to learn a lot more Elixir. Having done so, Phoenix and Ecto were much easier to understand.
Greetings comrades!
My name is Dmitriy and I am living in Kazakhstan.
Since 2007 my work is HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL (Fullstack) development.
Almost a year I am working with Elixir and Phoenix. And I like it!
I’m a self-taught programmer from Germany with a background in Javascript.
During my coding journey I stumbled over the hurdle of how to design a program. I came across “How to Design Programs” (https://htdp.org/) and Racket which made me fall in love with functional programming.
I dabbled in Clojure but I find it hard to get productive with it.
On a whim, I took a peek at Elixir and I’m loving it so far. It is more approachable than Clojure.
My other interests include pen & paper roleplaying games, mental models and learning techniques, communication, and language learning (currently learning French).
Hi! My name is Johanna and I’m from Sweden. I’ve always been interested in fp and spent lots of time exploring Clojure and Haskell in my free time. Work has been mostly JS, and a lot of my background is in frontend development, but lately I’ve transitioned into a more backend focused role, writing Go for a few months in my last workplace.
I recently took a new job with a SF company that has an office here. Although it’s a Ruby shop there’s some interest in Elixir, thankfully that includes the CTO. When I needed to build a microservice for a new project I managed to pitch Elixir and honestly, I’m hooked. I recognize a lot of the parts I liked about Clojure and Haskell, with pattern matching, recursion etc, but Elixir/Erlang has an unmatched “native” model for concurrency.
Hi,
I’m an Argentinian programming enthusiast.
I started at programming at 9-10 years old with the Warcraft 3 world editor’s JASS scripting language, then moved to PHP.
Now I’m 22 and worked in many web projects as a freelancer, always as a hobby and not for a living.
Currently I’m working on a personal entrepreneurship unrelated to programming, but I’m still spending my free time learning about backends and frontend design.
My biggest project is Embers, a cowdfounded latin-speaking social networking platform written in PHP and Vue.js. Embers is kind of a fusion between Tumblr and Twitter to give you an overall idea, but it’s more one of it’s own kind. I built almost all of it from the ground up, with ocassional help from various contributors.
Over the course of years I spent time learning various technologies, such as Node.js, Go, some of Ruby and C#, but I dedicated most of the time on learning backend architecture.
Almost two years ago I discovered Elixir and fell in love with it’s performance, ergonomics and concurrency model. Now I’m rewritting Embers in Elixir/Phoenix and I don’t regret a single bit
Hi my name is Binh. I’m from San Jose, CA USA. I used to work as a Rails and Android developer. Currently, I’m working as an in-home caretaker and using my spare time to learn Elixir, Phoenix web framework, and write a Phoenix Tutorial book so my friends can learn too.
Hello Elixir,
I am Marcin Gramza from The Netherlands. I have 20+ years background of programming different systems and using different languages. Elixir attracted me because of its syntax and the approach to concurrency.
I am still learning it and appreciate support of this community very much!
Just picked up Programming Elixir by Dave Thomas and diving in! Just wanted to say hi to the community
Love the language and have been wanting to learn more for a while now. About to go on a week vacation and I’m going to take this book with me. I have a small task coming up where I need process 1000s of files, send to the Cloud Vision API and remove files according to some business rules. Excited to maybe take this task as an opportunity to play with Elixir, wish me luck!
, I am Yarnus, a newbie from China.
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and video game soundtracks. 
