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Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

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Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#111

Post by thibaut_barrere »

dmix wrote: post #75
gregors wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Shopify adopted Rails is was quite new technology though...So they literally didn't follow this advice. In fact the CEO was part of the Rails core team. Here's a talk in 2008 by the CEO about their caching issues https://www.infoq.com/presentations/lutke-rockstar-memcachin...

I've been using Rails since 2007 I'm familiar with what it was like back then. I'm talking about 2024. I have a large tolerance for risk, and I'd be a risk taker for my own new projects or for a very early startup. Or if a tech offered something significantly new and better than the alternatives, like Rails did in 2007 vs PHP. But now that I'm older, and I value getting things in front of customers with the minimum a…

I also started using Rails a long time ago (circa 2005), and I have become older too (46 years now).

But I must say I think there is not much bullshit, and quite a bit of stability, in what Elixir / Phoenix bring to the table (saying this after maintaining a production French state-owned service running on top of Elixir for more than 3 years now).

There are also not that much framework bugs, the level of retro-compatibility is huge compared to Ruby in particular (except for LiveView which is still a bit young, but the rest is ... quite stellar).

I quite find that I could use exactly your last paragraph to describe _why_ I wouldn't pick anything else than Elixir these days. The TCO is great, the maintenance story is remarkably stable at the moment etc.

Googling works decently well now with Elixir too, the community is mostly fairly responsive.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#112

Post by cultofmetatron »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #63
pdimitar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really depends though. Part of the time you are right but there are legitimate businesses settings where not shipping by the end of next week can mean missing out on much-needed $50K or so revenue.

Often a feature pressure of "ship next week" is due to bad management and planning though. Often engineers already foresaw similar needs and were told no before. Then suddenly it is urgent.

> Often a feature pressure of "ship next week" is due to bad management and planning though

while thats usually true, it can also be a result of rapid customer feedback. what customers want might not be apparent till you put it in front of them. bad managers are one thing but if you're a startup, its more about responding to customer needs faster than the incumbent can.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#113

Post by dbbk »

My current company uses Elixir so I've had to pick it up, and while I get the idea, man the compile times are just awful. Our full app takes a good 15 minutes to build locally. And I don't know why, but I've had so many times where the incremental build has become corrupt and it needs to rebuild everything.

Coming from a PHP and Node background, I definitely miss the speed of development.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#114

Post by cultofmetatron »

ericb wrote: post #43
gregors wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got in-depth experience with many Rails apps and quite a few Phoenix apps (and many other stacks). I used to agree with your opinion, though I think Rails no longer holds a massive edge. Phoenix is now just as effective at releasing real-world products especially run-of-the-mill web apps. And when things get complex after a bit of time (usually due to business logic evolving) - much more effective. The place whe…

> On the other hand Phoenix destroys Rails in any realtime scenario. The Rails realtime story is going to be radically improved in Rails 8! I've been using the Turbo beta, and it is magical. With 3 lines of code each, I made my index page, and show page live, and real-time updating. I think Phoenix has something similar--perhaps it was the inspiration?

> I think Phoenix has something similar/

phoenix's channels (for realtime) is the only multiclustered websocket solution with long polling fallback that I know of that will scale to thousands of users out of the box. My startup uses websockets and its never been a bottleneck vs the headaches I've deal with doing similar stuff in nodejs. its just an absolute unit for doing realtime.

And now they have liveview which takes that and builds on it to accomplish magic.

rails has done great things but comparing it to phoenix on realtime stuff is like comparing a moped to an f16

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#115

Post by cultofmetatron »

firemelt wrote: post #97
gregors wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got in-depth experience with many Rails apps and quite a few Phoenix apps (and many other stacks). I used to agree with your opinion, though I think Rails no longer holds a massive edge. Phoenix is now just as effective at releasing real-world products especially run-of-the-mill web apps. And when things get complex after a bit of time (usually due to business logic evolving) - much more effective. The place whe…

can you give me example when phoenix destroys rails?

runtime performance for web requests absolutely demolishes rails. its not even close. I was seeing sub 10ms response times in developer mode. database queries end up being the overwhelming botteneck,

Then there's realtime. phoenix channels is the standard. everything else is a janky copy thats issing one or more factors that make it so good. elixir users lightweight threads so there's less overhead per connection which means you can run WAY more connections on a single machine. Live view takes this further but allocating a persistent process per user on which state can be synced to the frontend without writing ay javascript.

ruby on rails has more and better gems when your'e starting out but once you get some traction, maintenance on an elixir app is much easier due to it being functional.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#116

Post by namaria »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #58
y04nn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it was true 6 years ago, but I'm currently playing with Elixir/Phoenix and I feel very productive, Phoenix is well design and adding new functionalities is not that hard and the code is easy to debug. On the other side, Elixir and Erlang are not that popular and every time I talk about it to other developers, they may have heard of it but can't talk about it, so it's probably not that easy to find devs for a st…

What is the best freely accessible Phoenix tutorial? I recently searched a bit, tried a bit, but then ran into a problem, that should not have happened according to the tutorial. I guess the tutorial was outdated (got the RoR vibes from years ago). I could not fix it, due to the lack of understanding of how Phoenix works and what it wants me to do. Gave up again (for the second time) on learning Phoenix. Is there an…

Pragmatic studios has great Elixir and Phoenix courses, they upgrade the courses regularly and you get access to the new versions without extra costs.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#117

Post by anhner »

anonyfox wrote: post #107
mbesto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long story short from a business perspective - good luck logistically scaling a dev team from 2 founders to 100 devs as quickly as your app does. Elixir devs are hard to find and are expensive.

I have hired elixir devs recently, even worse: onsite only, and couldn't help myself with all the applications. And it wasn't like when hiring JS devs that I had to weed out the majority of super-junior candidates first. All around the statement of "hard to find devs" doesn't hold anymore as it used to. Just as a data point. And from the community often a saying is that there aren't enough Elixir jobs to begin with,…

Unrelated to elixir, but a company I worked at used a legacy and niche programming language in a few of their older projects. Their hiring strategy was similar: have a few seasoned programmers and hire juniors that are willing to learn (and there wasnt' a shortage of these). Never had a problem.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#118

Post by cultofmetatron »

voidfunc wrote: post #74

Meh, if you're not building your b2b SaaS company on one of the big names (python, Java, ruby, go, javascript) in 2024 you're just deeply unserious about running a company. The language is the last of your problems.

> you're just deeply unserious about running a company

is this sarcasm? ecosystem matters for certain projects.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#119

Post by namaria »

hansonkd wrote: post #41
mbesto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long story short from a business perspective - good luck logistically scaling a dev team from 2 founders to 100 devs as quickly as your app does. Elixir devs are hard to find and are expensive.

The reply's asking if you need 100 devs, might not realize this article was about building SaaS apps. Having worked at multiple unicorn+ SaaS products, the product feature demands are significant. Yes if you have one sole feature that you can pour all your engineering resources into like whatsapp delivering messages then it makes sense you might get away with 2 Elixir devs. If you are working at a unicorn who just ra…

Good point. There seems to be a strong correlation between fast growth, lots of money and technically unpleasant environment/stacks.

I'll take quality of life over money any day, but I realize I'm in an extremely small minority.

Re: Why Elixir Is the Best Language for Building a Bootstrapped, B2B SaaS in 2024

#120

Post by rio517 »

pdimitar wrote: post #34
y04nn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it was true 6 years ago, but I'm currently playing with Elixir/Phoenix and I feel very productive, Phoenix is well design and adding new functionalities is not that hard and the code is easy to debug. On the other side, Elixir and Erlang are not that popular and every time I talk about it to other developers, they may have heard of it but can't talk about it, so it's probably not that easy to find devs for a st…

(EDIT: To clarify, my comment is only a response to "not that easy to find Elixir devs for a startup") --- I don't speak for anyone except myself and a few acquaintances but I wouldn't accept an offer to work on a startup with Elixir unless we're talking at least $15,000 a month or more. And even then it depends a lot on team and company culture. I am tired of sprinting without that ever being connected to me getting…

Isn't this concern independent of the language?

> Requiring me to churn out 3-5 features a week in the first 6 months is the best way for me to hand my resignation a mere two weeks after starting.

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