We have some capacity coming up in the new year. If you need Elixir reinforcements one of my colleagues is currently available. Offer only open while supplies last :D

Also, seems like I may have some bigger openings off towards April if you want to line up some more in-depth consulting with me. These gaps pass very quickly so do reach out over email or schedule a call.

Recent stuff:

On BEAM Radio we talked to the current B in BEAM, Björn Gustavsson who works on the BEAM and the Erlang compiler at Ericsson. A lovely conversation and I really appreciate Björn joining us to chat.

My path into Elixir

For context, when I started getting into Elixir I was a mid-level experience tech-lead labeled as a senior. To break it down: 2 years work in CMS web dev, 2 years tech lead for agency flailing between CMS and web apps,  4 years tech lead though mostly without a team. We had spent the last 4 years building up a microservice-style setup based on the need for speed, scale and whatever the arguments were back then.

We built it based on an old Spotify blog post, cargo culting what they did. I learned a ton. I saw a lot of novel failure modes. It was fun to build a lot of stuff that already existed but we didn't know about. It was about 300% overhead for our tiny very flexible team and it was all to try and meet management directives about massively scalable. I guess we were going to the moon of preschool education platforms. It did not fully turn out that way.

Oh. And Python is bad at concurrency and not a particularly good language to build these kinds of services in.

My occasional and fairly briefly present CTO of the time had a Ruby background and was smitten by Elixir. I ended up looking into it and really enjoyed what I saw around Phoenix Channels and Phoenix Presence (this dates it to around 2015-2016, Presence was sneak-peaked in 2015). I also ran into some Nerves talks and off-and-on tried setting up a Phoenix project, tried setting up a Nerves project. Built some basic demos, tried Channels and so on.

I think I started to try grokking OTP back then as well. Reading about Supervisors and GenServers with the old version of these guides. I remember having it as leisure reading when taking a breather from extended family social events. Building software castles in my head. This was around the time I went off to work on my own.

Industry was very healthy so I was unconcerned, had probably a 3 month break from the job and into starting to look for consulting clients. Went to do work with a PHP client but spent my spare time on Elixir and various experiments. Twitter bots, SaaS ideas, nothing that became anything but I got practice in with Elixir itself, Phoenix and Ecto. Built Inky which was a port from Python to Elixir. Very good practice as I was comfortable in Python and vaguely capable in Elixir.

Then I caught wind of my first Elixir client, got a contract going and never looked back.

But the learning process was very ad-hoc. I intentionally went through and read the tutorial stuff on commutes and such to just know how the language worked, to be able to write the code. I used Phoenix for making web experiments. Then I was terribly curious about the legendary OTP stuff and that made me want to read about how I could use that and how that worked so I ended up filling in a lot of background, essentially at times when I couldn't sit and hack on it.

I did not read books to learn the fundamentals of Elixir. I didn't buy a course. I got to mooch off of someone's Programming Phoenix and I think I got Elixir in Action and I must have read it, or some of it, but I don't recall when. If I had it might have gone faster. It is a very good book to clarify Elixir for an already-capable programmer.

Your path may be very different. If you know how you learn you don't need to walk my path. I outline this mostly because it came up recently and this is a quick stab at trying to make sense of how I got going.

Being comfortable building a GenServer or a Supervisor, passing messages. All that unlocked everything else I wanted to do in the ecosystem. Membrane, using (not understanding) Nx via Bumblebee. Everything builds on those fundamentals and depending on what you want to do you'll build different skillsets.

I mostly want you to check out the shirts. I look forward to having the Elixir one. You can reach me on the Fediverse where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org or by responding to this email to lars@underjord.io.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate you.