I’m in a bit of a unique position where I have the opportunity to shine a spotlight on Elixir for my team. We’re hosting a series of weekly technical sharings, and it’s my turn to present. Given that our company’s tech stack predominantly revolves around Ruby on Rails and Golang, I’m eager to introduce my colleagues to the wonders of Elixir.
I believe that Elixir’s unique features and its robust ecosystem could offer fresh perspectives and solutions to our current practices. However, I want to ensure that my presentation resonates well with Rubyists and Gophers alike. To do this, I’m seeking insights from you guys.
What do you think are the “killer features” of Elixir that would appeal most to developers experienced in Ruby and Go?
For golang developers you can tell them that you have the same lightweight concurrency without any deadlocks or other low-level problems that golang concurrency has at its API level.
You can always show them some intricate pattern matches (and their equivalent in other languages), don’t forget about binary pattern match, a killer feature in itself (also a good example of some binary parser section in elixir vs other languages might be welcome).
For rails developer, there is phoenix, you could show them some shiny new things that they don’t have (for example how heex can validate html at compile-time).
Another killer feature is runtime interaction and observability. This video by @sasajuric is an absolutely great demonstration of that.
I would skip fault-tolerance (maybe just mention it and if there are questions you can expand on that), as for people that never used erlang VM this is an unknown concept that needs a separate talk in itself. If you could come with a simple but effective demo to showcase that for a real-life problem, it might be well worth to display that too.
Distribution, livebook, nx, bumblebee are also a great topic. These things are beyond what those languages can achieve, however you could showcase them for example how easy is to connect to a remote machine and run a computational task with livebook.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Even though Ecto is a great tool, I don’t think its going to impress a Rubyist as much as other features IMO. I would want their impression to Elixir be SHOCKING
Please feel free to share more thoughts if you got any more!
Livebook has so much features that even myself havent touched them all
I will definitely include it in my sharing though. In fact, I might give presentation using Livebook itself!
Thx for replying!
Some great recommendations in this thread already so I’ll refrain from adding any of my own.
But I will say I have found the culture of the company can affect it to.
So maybe compile an outline of the different options of topics you could discuss and maybe a one sentence blurb about what that is, and send those to a couple trusted colleagues that are representative of your typical Ruby and Go colleagues. Or have a 5 minute chat with them as you go through it together
See what they think would make the most impact or draw the most interest. Nothing stinks worse than putting together a really tight talk and then people tuning out 2 minutes in.
Thing which may seem interesting to golang developers is simplicity, elixir doesn’t have as many features as C++ (biggest enemy of all golang devs) and it’s still pretty concise.
Erlang/Elixir aren’t unique with this tool a little self-promotion
A little teaser of the new tool ‘Observer’ for the coming release Ergo Framework 3.0. This tool allows you to inspect your remote nodes, network, processes, etc.
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a little self-promotion
