Hello,
my name is Calancea Daniel. I have worked at Lightcyphers, but because of project shortages, I had to leave the company. Currently I am searching for a position as elixir developer, however I was not able to get a decent response from any companies I’ve applied to.
I have 4 years of experience of developing/architecting/deploying libraries and servers in elixir/erlang. Because there are very few elixir developers, I also taught complete novices elixir and its philosophy and managed their progress.
The list of projects I participated to are:
Tachowork; a platform for downloading and managing tachocards and tachograph downloads. This project was fully architected by me and mostly developed by me as a prototype. The platform included a lot of components such as: custom electronics for downloading from tachographs, android application with custom drivers for communication with usb smartcard readers, a backend for users developed with elixir and liveview that also had a fully fledged role access system made from scratch, a parser for parsing DDD files using elixir and metaprogramming.
Prototype project using postgis/maplibre with liveview; In this project a prototype was developed for detecting telecom frauds in realtime on map, all the data was collected/processed using postgres and geometries generated using postgis, map was powered by maplibre-js.
Fraud detection system; This was the last and hardest project, the task here was to stabilize and improve a fraud detection system. The system requirements were what the erlang runtime shines: uptime 99.999% and soft realtime. This project involved a lot of postgres optimizations and migrations in a running production environment with minimal downtime. A lot of migrations tasks were done by using the new livebook, connecting it to the production server.
As of open-source, the biggest project I managed to accomplish was to run a elixir project on android. This was accomplished together with JeromeDeBretagne and it included fixing the build process for arm64 on android, creating new instructions on how to build and link openssl for android build, changing how otp release finds the relative path for binaries. After doing all that I was probably the first person to successfully start a phoenix server on android without superuser requirements.
I’ve tried to apply to multiple companies (most of them from elixirforum), however I was not even able to even receive a response from most of them, and I cannot locate the root of the problem of why this happens.
Here is my resume, I use it to apply for elixir jobs, it includes the practical skills that I’ve developed while working with elixir/erlang.
If you have time to review, and come with feedback, I would appreciate it very much.
Your current position is “team leader”, so this might give the recruiters an impression that your expectations won’t match the offer as they are mostly hiring for mid- and senior developers. Team leader after 4 years out of university seems pretty quick. I’m not saying you don’t have the skills, but maybe it would be worth to downplay them a bit if you are comfortable with that. You could say “Elixir developer with leadership responsibilities” - I think this could resonate with a recruiter better.
The resume is pretty light on the details. You were involved in projects, but what did you do exactly? What was your role in those projects? What was the business problem that you solved? How did that translate into company success? Try to address those questions in the resume. You could start by putting the content of the post into the resume.
It is cool that you worked at the intersection of gis and elixir. In case you haven’t already applied, try Felt. They won’t answer my inquiries, but you should be a perfect fit for them.
Thanks for the feedback! I was never comfortable with the format of the resume, but this is pretty much the format that I saw is used on the market, recruiters tend to discard the resume if it has a lot of text.
Lately, I was sending them this post together with the resume and most of them didn’t even read the post, asking the very same questions that I answer here.
I think a example of resume for an elixir developer would be a very good addition to this platform!
There are probably differences between what European vs American people expect to find in a resume. I’ve only worked in the US so I’ll give some advices that worked for me.
First you need a one-line objective to concisely describe what you are looking for. You need to help the recruiter… to help you, by telling them what level (senior?) do you want, what area/industry do you specialize in or want to work in? Elixir is still a niche language, so you might want to specify backend. Or fullstack.
This objective part should be the 1st thing people see. Well they see your name first but this should be what really catches their attention. Also if you have the time, you can totally customize this for specific employer.
The second part of your resume should be a summary or “summary of qualifications”. This part can be formatted as bullet points. Think of this part as evidences to support what you are looking, e.g. I have N years of elixir backend development, M years of Android and so on.
This might also save you the trouble of answering the same set of questions over and over again. Though I’ve had recruiters who won’t read past the objective, because they kept asking how many years of experience do you have in this and that while my resume clearly listed those numbers.
I’ve always managed to get jobs through recruiters so be sure to treat them nicely and make their life easier in anyway you can. In case they did manage to get you a job, you can even leverage them to negotiate a higher offer!
This really helps, also making different version until it’s refined. I think of this as an art, cause you can be creative and be straightforward on how to portray oneself to the recruiters.
We have the exact opposite problem. We list Elixir as part of our tech stack, but we don’t get any Elixir devs applying. Mostly just Ruby devs that are “curious about Elixir”… le sigh.
We did the foundation of the things Diode used later in their products. We fixed the build process for OTP for arm64 architecture and fixed the problems that appeared on linking the OpenSSL statically, libraries like crypto from OTP cannot be compiled without OpenSSL.
I want to thank you all for the feedback and interest. Currently I was unable to find an elixir job (after about 2 months of search), I doubt that the resume was the main culprit here, but I was unable to find what the actual problem is, maybe the fact that I am located currently in Moldova.
I will update my resume with the recommendations you mentioned, and most probably try to apply again next year.
If you have any interesting offers, feel free to contact me.
It was quite some time ago, but your last info said that you didn’t manage to find anything for yourself in Elixir world. If you are interested, just check out Curiosum at https://curiosum.com/ If anything is of interest to you, then apply freely Hope to help
Actually I’ve decided to not move with the golang, checking for null pointers and reinventing the wheel for basic functionality is not that interesting.
I got already hired at a startup that decided to use elixir as their backend, for now this is all I can say, maybe I’ll share more information in a separate post once we launch the product.
Hope to help
