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11 Comments

Any indie dev building with Elixir/Phoenix?

Hi all,

are there other developers interested in Elixir/Phoenix? My personal projects so far were always on Rails, but I now gained some Elixir experience through my work.

If yes, introduce yourself and tell me about your Elixir project! If you tried it, but went back to original stack, let me know why.

  1. 4

    I have started to love Elixir and Phoenix. I have experience in building production systems in more than 6 programming languages (including Python, Ruby, PHP), however, I think Elixir is the best of the lot.

    Even though Python is a great programming language, I have always felt very productive with Ruby and Rails - with Elixir, I feel equal if not more productive and clear code with the right structure as well as performance is added bonus.

    I have 2 projects in Elixir:

    1. Soopr API - https://www.soopr.co - content marketing tool
    2. APIC Agent - https://apicagent.com - a simple user agent lookup API

    I still prefer building web-apps in Rails though - the reason for that is Elixir ecosystem is twofold

    1. There aren't enough libraries to support a lot of varied things you may need
    2. Elixir Ecosystem itself is changing quite quickly - you can't really take a few years old projects and expect them to work (unless they are actively managed)

    One of the features I really loved in Phoenix is plugs - wrote a blog post explaining it in more detail - https://soopr.xyz/Jx58WqvP

    1. 1

      I agree with 1, but I think the second point can turn in Elixir favour in future. Elixir, the language is practically done, and Phoenix also don't see radical changes (albeit there are still updates for LiveView).

      Thanks for sharing.

  2. 3

    Hey! Founder of GetBittr.com here. I'm not the original developer (@cosminh did 99% of the heavy lifting, thank you! 🙏) but I now maintain the code and create new features. We use Elixir for the back-end of Bittr and are very happy with it!

    I did build a management/admin dashboard from scratch with Elixir / Phoenix LiveView and that's just absolutely fantastic. It's so smooth and so easy to pick up on. I've basically learned everything from two online courses: https://pragmaticstudio.com/elixir#buy I would HIGHLY recommend these if you're new to Elixir!

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing your experience, the courses look great!

  3. 3

    Hey,
    I'm using Elixir/Phoenix for https://www.thisismylaunch.com This is my first project which I launched just recently. It's a platform for launching new products and services. I have some PHP and a little bit of Rails experience but I've been working exclusively with Elixir for some time now and I absolutely love it.

    1. 1

      This comment was deleted 3 months ago.

      1. 1

        Just a little bit od AlpineJS and TailwindCSS

  4. 2

    Using Elixir is a superpower and secret weapon. What's great about it is not just the syntax, developer ergonomics and community, but OTP - which allows you to do things that other languages/platforms simply aren't technically capable of. Since Elixir is immutable and distributed, you can do things like websockets, background jobs and in app caching all without external services.

  5. 2

    I work with the Mozilla Hubs team and their platform is built on Elixir / Phoenix. Here's an article on the elixir blog

  6. 1

    It's been a couple of years, so my information is out of date and I could be confusing things, but I really liked the platform, except for two things.

    • The functional-to-relational mapping makes a bunch of things that look like objects, but either didn't act like objects (because it's a functional language) or acted too much like objects to fit the language. I forget which.
    • Every time I asked about tooling or standard approaches--site authentication was the one that finally convinced me to move on, but I vaguely remember that seeding the database came up, too--the response was that they valued diversity in the community, and so didn't want (again, for example) a standard authentication system that everybody could validate, instead thinking that everybody making their own was going to be higher quality.

    I haven't had time to follow up to see if things have changed, but I'd be surprised if the wider community hasn't convinced them to keep up with everybody else. And I don't want to give the impression that the creators were anything but kind in my brief interactions with them. I just happened to disagree with them in ways that were fundamental enough to convince me that Phoenix wasn't the way for me to go. So, even if nothing has changed, that doesn't necessarily mean that the platform is wrong for anybody else.

    1. 3

      Happy to say things improved in that sense since I agree with you. Phoenix now has a baked-in generator for email/password auth and there is an excellent Pow library which would be your "one great auth library."

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