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.

Welcome to the forum @SyntaxSorcerer

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