Your Elixtory - how did you get into Elixir?

[Deithrian]

Uncle Bob Martin
The whole talk is amazing!

[eDev]

I was researching web frameworks, concluded that Rails was the best then heard Elixir & Phoenix was better! Rest is history

[AstonJ]

I was just about to post a ‘Your Elixtory’ thread - then thought I must have already posted something similar and I had! So giving this a quick bump for all our new members - how did you get into Elixir? Where has it led you?

[gregvaughn]

I credit/blame Dave Thomas. I had bought his Programming Ruby book early and it served me well. He has great taste in languages. I’d seen José tweet about Elixir, but I really wanted to hear what he had to say about Rails. But when I learned Dave was motivated to write Programming Elixir I immediately bought it in beta in early 2013. Elixir was at version 0.9 or earlier. I’ve been hooked ever since.

[chouzar]

As a hobby project was working towards a portable “web arcade”, basically a micro-controller would host various JavaScript games that you could play in your browser in a local network. There was no backend (aside from the uC serving the webpage).

In the meantime discovered elixir and thought it would work great as a backend for local phone multiplayer games. Invested in the language and a year later I was at elixir conf taking the nerves workshop. After the workshop I asked for advice to an experienced member of the community… said something in the lines of “Put attention mostly to OTP, the nerves project and make a game out of it”.

It seems I was not that lost and now fully invested in the language’s ecosystem.

[Nicd]

It was a dark and cold night back in summer 2013… I had decided I wanted to learn functional programming and I stumbled upon Erlang, and it piqued my interest with its distribution and fault tolerance features (I had studied distributed systems in university the year before). I spoke about this on IRC and a friend suggested this new language called Elixir. It was love at first sight… Been excited about Elixir ever since. It was something like 0.10 back then, and it has come so far!

[adrianrl]

I was looking for a language that made me more productive than C# and less error prone than JavaScript, so here I am, also I was looking for a language that manages concurrency well. After comparing Go and Elixir, I concluded that Elixir is a very underrated technology, despite the performance provided by Go (also I dislike its syntax a lot).

One year and half later, I’m still happy with the change for personal projects. However, I’m not totally in, the job market here is very small.

[voltone]

I had written a TCP NAT traversal solution in Ruby using EventMachine, to run alongside a Rails API server. It worked ok-ish for demo use with very little load, except that it crashed with a different exception every two weeks. We were toying with the idea of making it part of the production setup, and this obviously wasn’t going to fly.

So I rewrote the whole thing in Erlang in one day, and it ran flawlessly for months at noticeably higher throughput and lower latency. Then I saw the Elixir public announcement, so I rewrote it again to make it more accessible for my coworkers. This must have been Elixir v0.5: no Mix, no Hex, no maps, no structs, … but it worked beautifully, of course.

[7676ee]

I was learning Javascript on Udemy, and stumbled upon Stephen Grider. Amazed at his teaching skills, I started taking many of his courses, one of which was/is Elixir/Phoenix. Got intrigued and watched different Youtube videos on Elixir. Bought books, now reading/studying.

[mstibbard]

I’ve been a hobbyist for a while, primarily using python & django. OO never really made all that much sense to me, and I saw some people over on Hacker News saying good things about functional programming and specifically Elixir/Phoenix - so I thought I’d give it a go. I have been really enjoying it

[mbuhot]

I was contacted by a recruiter after they saw I had listed Haskell as one of my interests in a LinkedIn profile.

I spent the next four-day-weekend learning the language with the help of Dave Thomas’ book and completing a coding exercise for the job.

After such a great opportunity fell into my lap, I’ve been a little more appreciative of recruiters. Without them I wouldn’t have had the chance to use functional programming in my day job.

[alfredfriedrich]

Came into functional programming via Haskell, loved it but it felt “too pure”. Looked for Web frameworks and found ChicagoBoss and Erlang, took a while but then I loved the Erlang syntax.

Had a short look into Elixir, but it had no dots and commas (must have been around 2015)

2 years ago I heard about a Web framework called Phoenix, tried it and immediately fell in love with it and Elixir.

[_rubenfa]

My background was mainly in the .NET world. I was a little bit tired about doing the same things always, so I asked some friends what technology/platform could I learn to avoid monotony. At that time I was thinking about Node, Python or something similar, but a friend told me that if he were me, he would learn Elixir because it’s something totally different. I didn’t know what the hell Elixir was, so I started to search for information and wow, I fell in love.

Now I’m working with Elixir as my main job and I pretty happy.