I second the recommendation to build something with Plug first. Phoenix was my first dip into Elixir, but I quickly found that I didn't know wtf was going on. I

I second the recommendation to build something with Plug first. Phoenix was my first dip into Elixir, but I quickly found that I didn't know wtf was going on. I built a little API thing that accesses sheets via the Smartsheet API, and decided to do that from scratch. Started with a GenServer to do the API access, and then added Plug. This showed me how all of the pieces fit together without starting from even a Plug template. Very useful exercise!