A recent chat with @leifericf inspired this thread - he’s worked in the gaming industry, and so it got me wondering what kind of industries everyone else is working in and where Elixir might be getting used.
Please let us know where you’re working and if possible, what you’re working on! 
Feel free to mention your company if they’re using Elixir!
I work at a consultancy, envylabs.com. I built and continue to work on a client app written in Elixir, gamedaymath.com, which is in the sports betting industry and primarily provides analysis of offered betting lines to sports bettors.
I am working in the payments domain where we provide card processing, issuing and acquiring solutions. Unfortunately no Elixir till now as it is mainly Java solutions plus oracle/SQL server databases which make introducing Elixir a little bit harder as no commercial support for PostgreSQL in the market for critical service
since I’ve started working with Elixir i’ve already worked on a few industries:
the first 2 were brazilian companies, that i’m not sure still uses elixir to this day, but all the other ones were US companies that i’m sure still works with elixir.
Industrial automation, mostly for underground coal mines. I have an app that connects to SCADA for reporting, reads machine data for replaying machine operation, and various other things. It is mostly Elixir, with a bit of F# and C# where it is needed.
At the moment the restaurant industry managing reservations mostly. The elixir app is basically a glorified event processor (receiving and sending events), which makes it a good candidate for Elixir b/c of OTP and the concurrency handling.
I’ve worked on Elixir apps at other companies where Elixir was chosen because it provides a nice developer experience, rather than the primitives of the language (OTP, etc) being a good fit for the specific problem. Those apps were effectively CRUD apps and I could see swapping out Phoenix for Rails (as an example) and reaching a similar result (and probably having access to a bigger developer pool).
I’d be curious to hear from others working with Elixir why it’s a good/bad fit for whatever you’re working on!
I returned to the games industry in January 2024 
Updated my profile now.
We’re mainly using C++, C#, Lua, and Go right now.
I’m working in the sport and travel industry. I have previously worked with Erlang (telecom systems), Go, Delphi (security software) before.
Currently, I work with Elixir, Dart(Flutter).
I chose to work with Elixir because it allows me to natively integrate ML/AI (Nx and other libs) without relying to Python. I also have extensive experience with Erlang OTP. For me, Elixir is the best fit when building full stack, realtime and distributed system. I love how Elixir handles DSLs.
From my point of view, Elixir is the best choice for small teams (or solo developers) build complete systems.
It’s awesome to see Envy Labs still going strong! When I first got into Ruby and Rails they were one of the biggest Ruby shops around - great to see them in Elixirland too now! For those who don’t know Envy Labs were also the team behind CodeSchool, which Pluralsight bought.
Maybe you could introduce Elixir in different areas of the company? 
Nice, what has been your most enjoyable and which did you think suited Elixir the most?
I imagine that’s quite a unique sector to be in now. Wales had a lot of coal mines but pretty much all of them have been decommissioned. Funny thing is now we export over 50% of our green electricity to England! And they even drowned a village so that it could supply water for an English town. Grrr.
Great question! I pinched it for another thread: What are you working on and why do you think Elixir is a good/bad fit for it?
Oh wow! Try and get them to use Elixir? 
We already know SquareEnix use Elixir in some sort of capacity so that could be worth mentioning to them?
That’s great to hear! <3
Have you seen you can make Android apps with Swift now? Reckon you might drop Flutter for it?
Underground coal here is the higher quality steel making coal. I think there is a little bit of thermal happening in the open cuts but it is not as financially lucrative as it once was.
I will try Swift in the near future. Currently, Flutter is good enough, but it has some downsides. Async programming is simple in theory but not in practice. Managing the state of widgets is very difficult (if you don’t use other libraries). Making a run isolated (like an Elixir process) to achieve concurrency is quite complicated.
Heavy equipment maintenance work design & execution - think formula 1 pit stops, but for haul trucks with 150-350 tonne payload, dozers, excavators, conveyors, rock crushers, large pumps, turbines etc. Unlike F1, the pit stops don’t take 2 secs, they take 2-6 hours, but to give a sense of scale, the tyres on the trucks are 3.5m diameter (11.5 ft), so checking them over and changing the oil does take a little longer.
Industrial automation for hydro electric production. Elixir/Phoenix is used to get data from automata on remote sites (producing electricity from turbines), send commands to them, automate some actions, produce various alerts, store/query data in PostgreSQL (almost no Ecto, I love SQL),… The system was rewritten multiple times over the years and now is stablized since a few years on Elixir (and Phoenix) and PostgreSQL. Best move ever. The last rewrite was from Erlang to Elixir 
I love FP, Erlang, Elixir, OTP, the process idea, i.e. the whole philosophy, and… Phoenix LiveView. This is dope. The community is fantastic, the ressources are great, the friendship between Erlang and Elixir is astounding. I 
it. There are also some scripts in Ruby and Java also but I tend to write the new ones in Elixir.
When it comes to processes, threads, inter-communication, distribution, … my feeling is that nothing can beat Elixir (and Erlang of course).
Not yet, no! Maybe when the timing feels right. The tools team recently started using Go.
enjoyable is the current place I’m working right now. I really like the culture and people there.
the most technically challanging was the telephony infrastructure, i’ve to deal witha postgres cluster with more than 50 replicas with 2 layers of replication to avoid bandwith issues between regions. nodes all alround the world, from US to AU.
I think for all elixir was/is a good fit, being able to handle unbounded increases of incoming requests I think was the driving factor on choosing elixir.
That sounds neat!
I’ve been looking for companies that work on (renewable) energy for a bit, but combining that with working in Elixir turned out to be a bit more tricky than I was hoping for 
Any chance you guys are hiring/looking for freelancers for specific projects at the moment?
I currently work with EV charging stations, more specifically a platform that connects to a ton of different wallboxes and manages communication with aggregators/roaming providers, billing, etc.
Elixir has been quite nice for giving each wallbox it’s own little world to live in, while making it pretty straightforward to keep the frontend in sync via websockets (we use NextJS)
Not for the moment. Current projects are in maintenance mode and there’s no new Elixir project in sight.
My company is building an AI powered suite of decision making tools specifically for the government contracting industry. The company is fairly new and we’ve decided to fully adopt Elixir from the start.
I spent most of my career working in and with companies that deal in tangible goods: manufacturing, distribution, and chain retail outlets… and then a ~5 year stint with a financial & legal services company… but we don’t talk about that 
. My area of expertise is business systems. So accounting, inventory management, logistics, etc. Everything from a big-box entertainment retail chain to a distributor of frozen meat products servicing military customers, from manufacturers of scientific equipment to paint manufacture and retail.
Of that, it’s been about an even split between working inside companies and being a consultant (professional service organizations and independently).
After ~15 years of independent consulting through my little micro-consultancy, I’m just wrapping up the talks for me to formally join a client’s company that I’ve been helping for a little over a year. They manufacture dietary supplements.
For Elixir, I can see plenty of places where I wish it and the BEAM generally were at the heart of things… but these companies don’t do primary software development for the most part: they buy solutions from others and software development is about modifying what you bought. That also means typically the same old/dreary enterprise tech stacks. For the place I’m working with now, however, I will likely be bringing in Livebook if nothing else for some of the analytical work that I get engaged with from time to time. Also, I do think there are ways to get into the enterprise with less resistance that you’d find trying to go for the core systems (ERP, Accounting): many enterprises, for better or worse, acquire different systems from different software venders… those systems need to talk to each other in many cases. The integration glue that holds the monolith-of-monoliths together is a place where I think the technical demands align well with BEAM strengths and the decisions for integration technologies are a little more removed from boardroom/C-suite politics simply because it’s a more obscure technical subject matter. Sure there are plenty of products/solutions on the market already… but if you’ve got a chance with an Elixir based product it’s in this area. Of course you can build yet another SaaS solution for something and sell that in, too, but I consider that different that getting Elixir/BEAM technologies into the organization.
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