Bet big on elixir 6 years ago and it’s been rock solid for us the whole time.
We used it during the pandemic to serve tons and tons of traffic without any drama whatsoever.
We’ve hired 3 devs where they learned elixir on the job and love it.
We’re going to continue to invest in this lovely piece of tech. Thank you Jose, Chris, and all the other people that make this tech/community maintain a wonderful balance of innovation and pragmatism.
Same here, I overhauled the entire backend I was responsible for at my previous employment with Elixir (I was lead dev/CTO, so I had last say in the matter, and the one to bear the responsibility for any failure). The result was a remarkably resilient application that has never crashed once under my watch.
Now I'm building a SaaS solo in Elixir again. With a sprinkle of Rust. This is the best platform I have used in 16 years in this circus, bar none. Functional programming is fun, and doesn't have to be weird nor academic. And bollocks to defensive programming when you have supervisor trees.
New Elixir devs, spend some time reading through the Erlang docs as well. There is a treasure trove just below your feet that many do not even know about.
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Also, if anyone's looking for an Elixir consultant for short/medium term engagements, send me an email.
Phoenix 1.7 and LiveView 0.18 have exceeded my expectations and made things so much easier on the project we're using it on. Specifically:
1. Verified routes bring consistency between HTML and the routes defined in router.ex and are checked at compile time.
2. CoreComponents.ex simplifies a lot of HTML.
3. I like the way function components work consistently now.
4. Rendering large data sets with LiveView streams is great.
5. I like the simpler <li :for={item <- @items}><%= item.name %></li> syntax over <%= for item <- @items %><li><%= item.name %></li><% end %>. It's a lot easier to type.
If you're new to LiveView or just looking to get up to speed with all the great changes, Pragmatic Studio has an excellent Phoenix 1.7 LiveView course available: https://pragmaticstudio.com/courses/phoenix-liveview
we don't use liveview but we do use channels heavily in our product to provide realtime synchronization accross all devices at the restaurant. additionally, the performance has been fantastic while having a developer productivity rivaling python. the backend mostly consists of a monolithic graphql api.
not a good use of phoenix. sure it could be used for that but its cheaper to hire a php programmer to maintain it. our core api server which powers our apps is elixir because it is the best solution to that. our frontend doesn't need heavy interaction like a typical saas app would require so its not like we need liveview there either. basically, not enough reward for the effort.
Just wrapping up my first project in Phoenix (and first project in Elixir) and it's been a lot of fun to work in. I'm still learning and haven't quite got the component model down, but it feels like it's been extensible and is easy to refactor things. I do think the productivity has been higher in it than writing a separate API/React SPA or nextjs project. As this is our first saas product in a new business, it feels like a bit of a gamble, but so far Phoenix feels solid.
If anyone has some recommended resources on the right way to write apps in Liveview with components I'd love to read them.
Ohh, nice. I recently took the dive to update a side project to the 1.7 preview release to try to wrap my head around some of the new stuff. So far it's been a lot of fun, I really like Phoenix.
I could definitely use an updated copy of Programming Phoenix and Programming LiveView, both books have been really valuable as I got into Phoenix.
I really enjoy Elixir in general and I've been excited to see some of the recent stuff coming out. Great language, just feels fun to write in a way that not much else does for me these days.
But more importantly it is something very different. That is like saying chicken is much better than rice. Certainly a defensible position at some level but really hard to compare in others.
We used it during the pandemic to serve tons and tons of traffic without any drama whatsoever.
We’ve hired 3 devs where they learned elixir on the job and love it.
We’re going to continue to invest in this lovely piece of tech. Thank you Jose, Chris, and all the other people that make this tech/community maintain a wonderful balance of innovation and pragmatism.