Resources
The essays and books that shaped the "Elixir Is All You Need" philosophy. Start with the featured pieces, then explore deeper.
Start Here
Elixir as a Competitive Advantage
by Lars Wikman
Most mainstream technology choices provide no competitive advantage — Elixir stands apart. WhatsApp served 900M users with 50 engineers on the same runtime. Covers clustering, hot code updates, and why Elixir developers are disproportionately skilled.
Elixir and Phoenix Can Do It All
by Jason Stiebs
A comprehensive catalog of what Elixir and Phoenix replace: WebSocket servers, background workers, caching layers, message queues, and more. Jose Valim's philosophy of removing problems instead of solving them.
Why Elixir is the Best Language for AI
by Jose Valim (2025)
Elixir scored 97.5% solve rate across 30+ AI models — the highest of any language. Immutability, the pipe operator, and long-term stability make it ideal for both human and AI reasoning.
Articles
Choose Boring Technology
by Dan McKinley (2015)
The classic essay on spending "innovation tokens" wisely. Every new technology comes with unknown unknowns. Elixir's BEAM has 37+ years of production use — that's boring in the best way.
Elixir — A Dynamic, Functional Language
The official Elixir language site. Scalability, fault-tolerance, and productivity built on the Erlang VM. Used by Discord, WhatsApp, Klarna, PepsiCo, and more.
How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5 Million Concurrent Users
by Discord Engineering (2017)
Discord's deep dive into scaling Elixir processes, ETS tables, and GenServer patterns to handle millions of concurrent connections on a single cluster.
Oban Pro: Job Processing for Elixir
by Parker Selbert
Sophisticated, Postgres-backed job processing for Elixir with scheduling, smart queues, observability, and reliability features for production workloads.
The Nerves Project — IoT with Elixir
Build and deploy bulletproof embedded software in Elixir. The same OTP patterns that power telecom systems, running on Raspberry Pi and custom hardware.
Numerical Elixir (Nx) — Machine Learning in Elixir
by Elixir Nx Team
Multi-dimensional tensors and numerical computing for Elixir. Includes automatic differentiation, JIT compilation to GPU/TPU, and native integration with HuggingFace models via Bumblebee.
Broadway — Concurrent Data Processing Pipelines
by Dashbit
Build multi-stage, concurrent data ingestion and processing pipelines with built-in backpressure. Replaces Kafka consumers, Spark streaming, and custom worker pools.
Thinking in Elixir
Podcast exploring how experienced developers think about problems in Elixir. Real-world patterns, OTP design, and practical advice from the community.
Books
Elixir in Action
by Saša Jurić (2024)
The definitive guide to building production-ready Elixir applications. Covers OTP, GenServer, supervision trees, and distributed systems. Now in its third edition.
Programming Phoenix LiveView
by Bruce Tate & Sophie DeBenedetto (2023)
Build rich, real-time user experiences with Phoenix LiveView. Interactive UIs without JavaScript — the definitive guide from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Designing Elixir Systems with OTP
by James Edward Gray II & Bruce Tate (2019)
Go beyond the basics. Layer by layer design of Elixir applications using OTP patterns — GenServers, Supervisors, and the architecture that makes the BEAM special.
Programming Elixir
by Dave Thomas (2018)
The original Elixir book by a legendary programmer. Functional programming, concurrent thinking, and the joy of writing Elixir.
