I have one new video, this one trying to tackle a particular facet of learning Elixir, namely Functional Programming fundamentals. And now there will be a slight lull. I will not be recording one today and I will be off to the ski slopes for the next week. So that makes for a bit of a gap overall in my activities. I think I'll still get this newsletter out but that's about it.

This vacation time is sorely needed. Last few weeks have had a number of things up in the air, hanging over me, needing to be pinned down, written out, delivered and generally a lot. I'm bone tired and spending time with family and moving my body in fun ways should be great. If nothing else it is a break from work which is very healthy. I'm doing okay, I'm not worried. This last week and a half has just been a bit much.

I have my first publicly announced sponsor. These are companies that support my content efforts in return for me helping them be visible in the Elixir space, typically because they want to hire. I see it as a way to connect all of the people I talk to that want to work in Elixir with actual chances to do so. I talk to the company leadership, I talk to their developers and I try to represent what they offer to you all in a reasonable way.

West Arete
You can read more about them in my summary of the company over on the site. They are looking for Elixir devs, Ruby devs and someone to kick their DevOps up a notch. I've spoken to them and if you are in the US and want an intentional, craft-focused workplace that really puts money into work-life balance. They fit that bill. Super nice people, such a great attitude about the whole thing. If you want to support my efforts, helping the right people find the jobs page is the best thing you can do.

If your company would benefit from my help in establishing your connection to the Elixir ecosystem and help you get at pipeline for hiring Elixir Developers going, here's the thing. More details are available on request.

Elixir, Adoption and Hype

There's this theory called Diffusion of Innovation and it details a spectrum of people with different appetitates for innovation and when they will adopt new innovations. Essentially it speaks to what level of stability versus risk you are comfortable with, what kind of effort it takes to appeal to a group and so on. The typical groupings are, in order of easy to capture to near-immovable:

• Innovators
• Early Adopters
• Early Majority
• Late Majority
• Laggards

Elixir, the ecosystem, is not really at trying to capture any one part of this scale of audiences. Why? Because the ecosystem is at multiple stages of maturity and stability at once. On average, and measured by sort of the mainline web and distributed systems development work that Elixir is often chosen for I'd place it around working with the Early Majority and trying to push to Late Majority. From case studies and success stories capturing the Early to more and more establishing why it isn't even a risky move to hit the Lates.

Don't get hung up on Majority. Very few pieces of innovation in tech ever hit an actual majority. Consider it the majority of the feasibly adressable audience.

So Elixir itself, mainline Phoenix, Ecto, Hex, all the foundational stuff is around Early to Late in my understanding. But there are many parts of the Elixir world that are less established. I think Nerves is Early Adopters to Early Majority, not so much due to an immature platform but much more due to being relatively lesser known and speaking to a smaller market which is harder to reach.

Membrane, the media streaming framework which I love, is strictly Early Adopters at this point. The consultancy that is building it uses it plenty, the rest of us are sniffing around and doing minor things with it. It has fantastic potential but it needs much more material about how to do things with it. It needs to enable people to adopt it.

Lumen which I've been helping and which I still hope picks back up from a long pandemic hiatus is strictly starting towards the Innovator end of the spectrum. It isn't a thing yet but it very nearly is. Gleam, the typeful BEAM language, would be over there I think as well but with a working thing, looking to get it's Early Adopters going.

So where is something like LiveView? I'd say that on the cusp of going from Early Adoption among Elixir users to Early Majority. It is certainly in use in many places. The fact that I still regularly run into folks that do Elixir but haven't tried it yet tells me that it isn't in the Elixir users Late Majority. While if you hang out in the Innovator/Early Adopter area you are likely sick of hearing about it already.

I comfortably sit at Early Adopter. On occasion dabble towards Innovator, like my interest in Lumen was very early and my interest in Membrane as well. But that's for Elixir and other areas I'm comfortable in. I'm in the Majorities when it comes to DevOps. I'm either a Laggard or an Innovator when it comes to Serverless because I don't like much of it and trudge a different path.

When people look at a large technical picture like Elixir, as a single thing, depending on what they look for they will see very different levels of maturity and will assume very different levels of adoption.

What I can say is that from my own experience and from speaking to people that do corporate training, teach, run courses. Interest in Elixir is growing with larger organizations. The number of people moving from Java to Elixir seems steadily climbing for example. There are probably still more Java people than Elixir people being made overall but there are large, not particularly risky organizations exploring Elixir. I find that interesting and good for the community but I also don't particularly care if they like it, it isn't why I came to it and it isn't what I aspire to do. I don't care if we get the Laggards, hell I lose interest around the Late Majority, but it seems like that's whats coming. Cool, good for them. They'll benefit I bet.

If you have been on the fence about Elixir and recognize that you are still on the fence. I honestly have no idea what you are waiting for. You might want to consider how late you want to join this particular game. Maybe you like moving carefully and then late is great. Elixir, Phoenix and Ecto are all at the point of great, stable, not-very-exciting to me and have been for a couple of years. I don't think about them. I use them. LiveView is still moving enough that I pay attention.

And if you dive in or are new, it may all be exciting still. It is new to you. The tech hasn't gone stale. It has gone stable.

If you are on the fence or have thoughts I'd love to hear why or what at lars@underjord.io or on Twitter where I'm @lawik.

Thank you spending the time reading. I appreciate your attention.

- Lars Wikman