I initially wrote the backend for my current startup in Elixir, using Phoenix. As many Elixir developers, I'm coming from the Ruby and Rails world. I really enj

I initially wrote the backend for my current startup in Elixir, using Phoenix. As many Elixir developers, I'm coming from the Ruby and Rails world. I really enjoyed the language and there are definitely things in Phoenix that are a vast improvement compared to what's available in Rails (changesets are awesome for instance). However, after some weeks of development, I decided to move the project to Rails. We were still pre-launch so it didn't impact any users and only took a couple of days. The two main reasons for the move were: 1. *Ecosystem.* The Ruby and Rails ecosystem is just so much bigger and more mature. I cannot criticize Elixir for that, I'm just stating the fact. Ruby is many years advance and that shows in the breadth and maturity of libraries and deployment options. 2. *Re-learning basic things.* I found myself needing to learn how to do things in Elixir that I fully mastered in Ruby. I had to reinvent my own wheel in a way. And when you're trying to move fast to get your product out there, this is a waste of time. In the end, I realized that for my purposes, Elixir/Phoenix is just not 10x better than Ruby/Rails. I can tell that learned from some of the mistakes of Ruby/Rails and many things are better. But they're not drastically better for the project that I'm building, which in the end is a GraphQL backend for a more-or-less CRUD mobile application. Since the migration to Ruby, I'm much more productive and get things done much faster. I also spend a lot less time learning how to do X or Y. I felt relief when I didn't have to follow the Elixir ecosystem anymore and was able to unsubscribe from Elixir Newsletter and from the Elixir podcasts. I know that my move does not help my criticism that the Elixir ecosystem is too small. But I value the success of my startup more than the need to help advance the Elixir world. Maybe we will suffer long-term because of this choice, although examples like Shopify, Stripe or GitHub show that you can maintain massive codebases just fine in Ruby. But at this point of our startup, time to launch and velocity pretty much beats any other criteria.