I’m a former full-stack Rails dev of about a decade who’s getting back into development after spending the past ~5 years on the business side of mainly social-impact-focused B2B SaaS start-ups.
I’ve been researching the Elixir ecosystem for the past month and have decided to go all-in. There are a lot of reasons why I picked this ecosystem, but I was heavily influenced by Chris McCord’s keynote this year at ElixirConf US back in September 2025.
I was recently laid off and just created a stretch goal of up-skilling in the Elixir ecosystem so that I could possibly get some work as a dev in early 2026. To accomplish this goal I’ve signed up for the PragProg Elixir & OTP + Full-Stack Phoenix course, PragDave’s (The Coding Gnome) Elixir 2 course, and have purchased a small library of books on Amazon [1]. I’ve also subscribed to several YouTube channels and a few podcasts to round out my education.
Over the next month and a half I plan to go heads-down for a few hours a day to familiarize myself with idiomatic Elixir and become a competent user of the tools of this ecosystem. I’d also like to meet people in the community (I’m located in Denver, CO, if there are any locals on here ), and maybe find a seasoned Elixir dev who would be willing to temporarily take me under their wing as I get ramped up. Eventually – and hopefully sooner rather than later – I’d love to be in a position to give back somehow as well. e.g. if there are opportunities to make minor contributions to open codebases I’d be happy to help.
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading my intro, and thanks for having me as part of the community!
[1] Programming Ecto, Adopting Elixir, Elixir in Action, Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix, Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6, Testing Elixir, Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP
Welcome! As a former Rails devotee myself I think you’ll find Elixir/Phoenix to be an amazing next step. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of people here willing to offer pointers and answer questions. However…
Since you don’t mention it in your post, I hope you have considered the fact that Elixir has had a very “troubled” job market long since before the software job market as a whole started to nosedive. If landing a new job is urgent for you I would strongly advise you to consider focusing on a safer bet and wait to start digging in to Elixir until you have safe harbor somewhere for a while.
Thanks for the warm welcome, @tfwright ! This is good advice and you’re right to point this out. I’m not putting all of my eggs in one basket, so to speak.
That being said, there’s no way I can wait to start digging in to Elixir, even if it means making some short-term sacrifices. I know it might sound kind of “woo woo”, but it feels like I’m being pulled into this ecosystem by the gravitational force of a black hole. I don’t think I could wait even if I wanted to
As a personal aside, I started contemplating a move back to the dev side almost exactly a year ago, and I’ve spent the past six months getting back to basics. Now feels like a really good time to learn to build cool stuff (especially with the holiday slowdown coming) and I think I can get there in 1.5-2 months with some disciplined effort, and maybe a little help.
Looks like you’re on the right track already but be sure to check out the reviews in our Learning Resources > Books section as it may help in deciding what to get next. Feel free to start a journal if you feel your experience may be able to help others, and as @tfwright mentioned you’ll get plenty of help from people on the forum should you have any specific questions.
Not sure I’d agree with this tbh, we’ve had hundreds of jobs posted here on the forum and I’d hazard a guess to say way more than other similarly hyped languages that came out around the same time as Elixir, other than perhaps Rust but that’s by Mozilla. Just had a quick look at Ocaml and Crystal and they’ve only had a handful of jobs posted https://ocaml.org/jobs and https://forum.crystal-lang.org/c/jobs/14 yet we’ve had significantly more here.
One thing you could argue, as you could for Erlang, is that you don’t need huge teams like you might for other languages, WhatsApp is a famous example where their team compromised of just 50. In a way, that could prove a positive for Elixir in an age of AI, where in other languages the bulk of teams appear to be being cut/replaced by AI - so since huge Elixir/Erlang teams weren’t necessary to begin with if more companies adopt Elixir then it could even out. It’s certainly going to be an interesting few years that’s for sure.
Thank you for your feedback and suggestions, @AstonJ ! I hadn’t considered starting a journal but I will check that out.
100%. I’ve been thinking about this topic quite a bit. Another cool example you might know of is the Discord team, which I think is comprised of only 5 engineers.
I’m still very new to this ecosystem, but I’m really excited about the potential of combining Elixir + Phoenix (and AGENTS.md) + Ash + Tidewave + Expert LSP (and so on and so forth) with some very intentionally designed guardrails to rapidly prototype greenfield projects with AI, and hopefully pave a clear path to developing production-ready apps.
This might be a really good time for solo devs in the Elixir ecosystem to take on some side projects, or maybe even start their own dev shops. At least those are options I’d like to keep open in the next 3-6 months
Hi @AstonJ , this might be a dumb question, but is there a specific forum feature or canonical way of starting a “journal” here? I used the search tool but didn’t see any examples I could mimic.
When starting one just lay out what you intend to use the thread for to give people an idea of what to expect and whether you welcome comments or others joining in too
), and maybe find a seasoned Elixir dev who would be willing to temporarily take me under their wing as I get ramped up. Eventually – and hopefully sooner rather than later – I’d love to be in a position to give back somehow as well. e.g. if there are opportunities to make minor contributions to open codebases I’d be happy to help.
