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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

#121

Post by s3cur3 »

bnchrch wrote: post #93
s3cur3 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here! I've not been compensated by the Petal Pro devs at all. I've interacted with them exactly twice—once in support and once to submit the world's tiniest PR. I'm just a happy customer. (If that's not enough, you can dig in to the Petal Components repo and see I'm not a contributor.)

Ah shoot, well then I'm sorry, that is unfair criticism on my part. The pitch was just so direct, coupled with the perfect topic of "Want to build a SaaS? Use Elixir" I would have assumed you owned the paid boilerplate you discussed. I unfortunately can't edit the post but I upvoted this in the hopes that people see it.

No sweat, I get it! :D

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

#122

Post by sb8244 »

pdimitar wrote: post #106
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that’s inherent to the language, or a result of common patterns? How do other languages, like Python, scale better to more devs, besides more devs available? All that comes to mind immediately is modules in Elixir being globally available, but I’m genuinely curios about your experiences.

It's mostly related to the fact that Elixir code is very terse and easy to understand, and that if you put 100 devs on a singular Phoenix web/API project codebase they will be stepping on each others' toes all the time so they need to kind of take turns if they don't want the codebase to become a complete mess. Thirdly, Elixir devs are on average quite senior in general (as they are usually refugees from other stacks…

This doesn't track with my experience.

We scaled an org with both Ruby and Elixir (later, 1 of the 2 blessed languages) and there was no tangible difference in that way.

You could also scale in other ways like microservice. Elixir plays great in that world, as pretty much every language does.

Regarding one man armies. Usual way I've seen to scale is to find those one man armies and put less expensive Jr + mid engineers on their team and have them work together. I don't think that's an Elixir thing though.

I'm not trying to sell Elixir here. I think it has benefits in smaller org size that mellow out and equalize as a company grows. Also, startups should always work in whatever language is most comfortable to founding team.

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

#123

Post by karmajunkie »

cigrainger wrote: post #100
karmajunkie wrote: post #4

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years. it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, an…

Hey! I gave a talk at Code BEAM Europe this past year about our experience with a year of machine learning on the BEAM [1]. That is, the impact on our business of going 'all in' on Elixir from a more fragmented stack (Python for ML and ETL). We actually did this twice, once in 2020 from a JS front end/Elixir back end to LiveView, then again in 2022 for the ML/ETL stuff. We benefitted massively on both occasions. I re…

now this is what i’m talking about…

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

#124

Post by ericb »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #114
ericb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ta…

> comparing it to phoenix on realtime stuff is like comparing a moped to an f16

Have you tested this? I ask because under the hood, Rails is using Faye, and Faye is using EventMachine.

About 10 years ago I load tested Faye vs. Node in a websocket scalability test for a websocket based chat app I was writing, that, funnily enough had a polling fallback. We had scalability needs up to around 10k or 20k simultaneous connections if I remember right and I wanted to know their ceilings before we wrote the real code and invested in either.

Faye kicked Node's butt on simultaneous connections and throughput. Node fell over while Faye was still going. Eventmachine, which Faye uses, can scale like nobody's business. It IS an F16.

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

#125

Post by thibaut_barrere »

karmajunkie wrote: post #123
cigrainger wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! I gave a talk at Code BEAM Europe this past year about our experience with a year of machine learning on the BEAM [1]. That is, the impact on our business of going 'all in' on Elixir from a more fragmented stack (Python for ML and ETL). We actually did this twice, once in 2020 from a JS front end/Elixir back end to LiveView, then again in 2022 for the ML/ETL stuff. We benefitted massively on both occasions. I re…

now this is what i’m talking about…

I overall agree with your sentiment (and this is not some bashing on Tyler's blog post by the way) - Elixir is good enough that we could focus on "Showing" instead of "Telling", at least that's what I'm trying to do more and more.

And the OP presentation about ML is spot on in that regard :-)

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

#126

Post by karmajunkie »

dqv wrote: post #61
zelphirkalt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would get it from the phoenix's beak honestly - https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/overview.html

agreed, the phoenix dubs and guides are excellent.

for elixir books, i strongly recommend sasa juric’s elixir in action—it’s the best explanation of processes and genservers i’ve found.

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

#127

Post by karmajunkie »

gregors wrote: post #45
selcuka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a (slow) migration, though, not a rewrite from scratch. They kept shipping software.

Exactly my point. The way the vast majority of rewrites happen.

yep, that’s the right way to do it.

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

#128

Post by karmajunkie »

farhanhubble wrote: post #30
karmajunkie wrote: post #4

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years. it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, an…

That's micro-shortsightedness. Lots of tools even OS utilities are being rewritten in a "better" language. It could be quite beneficial from a business perspective too if you're spending more time fixing issues than addressing new requirements.

it’s kind of a matter of scope. you’ve got a team, at least a couple developers, rewriting a microservice that really needs an overhaul for performance? go for it.

you’re a solo developer rewriting the fundamental application your company sells and depends on for revenue? yeah, maybe not so much. (actually there’s no maybe about it. don’t do this.)

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

#129

Post by thibaut_barrere »

mbesto wrote: post #28
karmajunkie wrote: post #4

i have to be honest: as a lover of the language, and with due respect to the author, i’m really tired of these “why i picked elixir” takes extolling the same virtues (or some subset thereof) we’ve seen written up in darn near every introductory article on elixir for the last five or six years. it’s not that i think they’re wrong, at all. it’s just that they add nothing new to the conversation, they’re superficial, an…

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.

We went through a round of recruiting (Elixir app here) and found that as reflected on the StackOverflow survey from last year, a lot of people are willing to learn Elixir at the moment.

We've had non senior people onboarded a few months and they are doing well with Elixir at the moment, fwiw!

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

#130

Post by Zababa »

Is it worth it to learn Elixir (including Phoenix, and I would guess some Postgres) to be able to rapidly build websites? My day job is mostly Go microservices, making anything this way takes a lot of time and doesn't really feel worth it for single-person projects.
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