How a team that was new to Elixir over-delivered a big project in just three months. By Sophie DeBenedetto.
Adopting a new language is more than just a technical journey. A language is only the right tool for the job if your engineers can wield it well. So, as a technical leader you don’t just select a language or a framework based on its technical capabilities and how suited it is for the problems you need to solve, you also try to optimize for the skills your team already has, for a robust ecosystem surrounding that language, for strong community support, and so much more.
This Elixir success story centers on a three month engagement with an EdTech company to deliver Flatiron School’s in-browser IDE (Interactive Development Environment) and curriculum management system into their own ecosystem. This meant that we would be porting over some existing codebases in both Ruby and Elixir, as well as building out a new Phoenix application that our partnering EdTech company would need to maintain. These applications together represented a non-trivial set of features:
The article describes the success story in these steps:
- The project
- Why we chose Elixir
- The team
- The journey
- Our secrets to Elixir success
- Elixir has a gentle learning curve
- Elixir has a robust ecosystem
- Fast and comprehensive testing in Elixir
- Easy Elixir releases
- First class observability in Elixir
- An Elixir library for all your needs
- Elixir was the right tool for the job
- Elixir makes it easy to teach and learn
… and more. Many teams and organizations reach for Elixir to solve complex technical problems well-suited for Elixir’s concurrent, fault-tolerant, and distributed nature. Very interesting read!
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