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Chris: how do you feel about what's needed to make Phoenix as "core" of a technology like other similar projects like Django or Rails? The latter are used by hu

Chris: how do you feel about what's needed to make Phoenix as "core" of a technology like other similar projects like Django or Rails? The latter are used by huge companies, which have vested interest in keeping these technologies around and evolving. Is it corporate sponsorship from companies using Phoenix? Note, I've used Phoenix/Elixir as the core technology in the last of the 3 companies I've been in.

chrismccord 5y ago
We're already there. We have huge companies using elixir and phoenix, with phoenix powering the web platform for the majority of them. Several great case studies exist on elixir-lang.org if you're interested, ie: Pepsi: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2021/04/02/marketing-and-sales-intelligence-with-elixir-at-pepsico/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2021/04/02/marketing-and-sales-... Heroku: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/09/24/paas-with-elixir-at-Heroku/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/09/24/paas-with-elixir-at-... Change.org https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/27/delivering-social-change-with-elixir-at-change.org/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/27/delivering-social-ch... And of course Bleacher Report, which has been on Phoenix since 2014, well before 1.0. On the sponsorship side, DockYard invested in my work for the last six years where I spent the majority of the year working on oss, and I've just joined https://fly.io https://fly.io where I'll spend 85% of my time working on Phoenix and related libraries. So we are well covered on the corporate sponsorship side. We also have Michael Crumm on the Phoenix team who works at Cargo Sense, where they support a portion of his time working on LiveView. Of course it would be great for other large companies leveraging value out of our work to give back, but we're well established on the sponsorship side :)
- yetanothermonk 5y ago
  What's the other 15% of your time? :)
  - mrkurt 5y ago
    Everyone at Fly.io spends 15% of their time listening to me ask for blog posts.
- ch4s3 5y ago
  It's worked out really well for us at PepsiCo, it's basically our go to for in house application development on the eCommerce side. We'll be hiring some elixir devs again soon.
  - pablodavila 5y ago
    Would you happen to know if you (the company) hire international candidates?
    - ch4s3 5y ago
      We're not hiring any FTEs outside of the US yet, but we probably will in 2022. Keep an eye out, there should be some interesting stuff coming up in the future.
ipnon 5y ago
Ruby companies like AirBNB, Stripe ended up edging out their competitors using the relatively glacial Java or C++ frameworks. We will need to see a new generation of Phoenix winners before Elixir is taken seriously. It could be that the marginal performance gain from using Elixir is not worth the hassle of training and hiring in a whole new language. It remains to be seen.
- chrismccord 5y ago
  Just a small nit-pick here. If we're talking REST/graphql stateless APIs, sure the scalability gains may be a harder sell vs throwing hardware at the problem, but the value-add depends on what's being built. I built Phoenix first and foremost for real-time, stateful web applications. So anything that requires websockets, frequent updates, PubSub, presence, etc, you will be extremely hard to match what our stack provides out of the box, performance wise, and distribution wise. Not everyone needs these things but increasingly companies do, ie chats, social feeds, dashboards, and now LiveView-like interactive applications all change the equation from "marginal" perf gains.
  - ipnon 5y ago
    I am an Elixir evangelist, to be clear, but it's one thing to have believers and another to change the world. I think you are right that Phoenix will eventually win the day in regards to real-time, stateful Web applications. "Traditional" REST APIs may be a harder sell, and perhaps Elixir doesn't need to eat the entire Web to considered successful. There are still many Java developers at work after all. I am flattered to be critiqued by you!
- scns 5y ago
  Sorry but i can't help myself, "marginal"? Bleacher Report replaced 150 Ruby servers with 8 running Elixir.
  - ipnon 5y ago
    Technically "marginal" refers to the gains made by an incremental improvement, in this case the adoption of Phoenix over Rails, and not the use of Phoenix over nothing at all. So we still refer to the gains from Phoenix as marginal, even though they are substantial in many cases.

chrismccord 5y ago

We're already there. We have huge companies using elixir and phoenix, with phoenix powering the web platform for the majority of them. Several great case studies exist on elixir-lang.org if you're interested, ie: Pepsi: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2021/04/02/marketing-and-sales-intelligence-with-elixir-at-pepsico/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2021/04/02/marketing-and-sales-... Heroku: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/09/24/paas-with-elixir-at-Heroku/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/09/24/paas-with-elixir-at-... Change.org https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/27/delivering-social-change-with-elixir-at-change.org/ https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2020/10/27/delivering-social-ch... And of course Bleacher Report, which has been on Phoenix since 2014, well before 1.0. On the sponsorship side, DockYard invested in my work for the last six years where I spent the majority of the year working on oss, and I've just joined https://fly.io https://fly.io where I'll spend 85% of my time working on Phoenix and related libraries. So we are well covered on the corporate sponsorship side. We also have Michael Crumm on the Phoenix team who works at Cargo Sense, where they support a portion of his time working on LiveView. Of course it would be great for other large companies leveraging value out of our work to give back, but we're well established on the sponsorship side :)

yetanothermonk 5y ago
What's the other 15% of your time? :)
- mrkurt 5y ago
  Everyone at Fly.io spends 15% of their time listening to me ask for blog posts.
ch4s3 5y ago
It's worked out really well for us at PepsiCo, it's basically our go to for in house application development on the eCommerce side. We'll be hiring some elixir devs again soon.
- pablodavila 5y ago
  Would you happen to know if you (the company) hire international candidates?
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    We're not hiring any FTEs outside of the US yet, but we probably will in 2022. Keep an eye out, there should be some interesting stuff coming up in the future.

ipnon 5y ago

Ruby companies like AirBNB, Stripe ended up edging out their competitors using the relatively glacial Java or C++ frameworks. We will need to see a new generation of Phoenix winners before Elixir is taken seriously. It could be that the marginal performance gain from using Elixir is not worth the hassle of training and hiring in a whole new language. It remains to be seen.

chrismccord 5y ago
Just a small nit-pick here. If we're talking REST/graphql stateless APIs, sure the scalability gains may be a harder sell vs throwing hardware at the problem, but the value-add depends on what's being built. I built Phoenix first and foremost for real-time, stateful web applications. So anything that requires websockets, frequent updates, PubSub, presence, etc, you will be extremely hard to match what our stack provides out of the box, performance wise, and distribution wise. Not everyone needs these things but increasingly companies do, ie chats, social feeds, dashboards, and now LiveView-like interactive applications all change the equation from "marginal" perf gains.
- ipnon 5y ago
  I am an Elixir evangelist, to be clear, but it's one thing to have believers and another to change the world. I think you are right that Phoenix will eventually win the day in regards to real-time, stateful Web applications. "Traditional" REST APIs may be a harder sell, and perhaps Elixir doesn't need to eat the entire Web to considered successful. There are still many Java developers at work after all. I am flattered to be critiqued by you!
scns 5y ago
Sorry but i can't help myself, "marginal"? Bleacher Report replaced 150 Ruby servers with 8 running Elixir.
- ipnon 5y ago
  Technically "marginal" refers to the gains made by an incremental improvement, in this case the adoption of Phoenix over Rails, and not the use of Phoenix over nothing at all. So we still refer to the gains from Phoenix as marginal, even though they are substantial in many cases.