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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

#51

Post by hansonkd »

pdimitar wrote: post #42
hansonkd wrote: post #32

I love Elixir, but I have to disagree with the principal aspect of this post. As an engineering leader what I look for when picking tooling for SaaS which essentially boils down to two things: 1) How expensive and difficult will it be to scale the Org. 2) How difficult will it be to implement product features. I attempted an Elixir startup and found that it failed at both. The language was lovely to use and very smar…

I am probably getting annoying as this is my 3rd such post in this thread but... have you posted a job ad in ElixirForum?

Yes, that is how I found the engineers I did find. I wasn't impressed by the applications I got, although who I hired was fun and talented. If I remember they were either engineers who's primary projects were actually erlang, high priced agencies, people who were elixir curious, or people have only made pet projects.

The freelancers I hired had Elixir experience from a previous job, but we ended up figuring out a lot of stuff together. It was harder to just hand off requirements and expect it to be done.

Granted my budget wasn't very big and I limited my scope to those within the Americas due to working hour constraints.

But it is very different from hiring for Python which is very easy to get a reasonably priced agency or freelancer with years of experience very fast.

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

#52

Post by outside1234 »

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…

They are doing this to recruit talent. That's the angle.

It is the Netflix playbook.

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

#53

Post by gregors »

pdimitar wrote: post #42
hansonkd wrote: post #32

I love Elixir, but I have to disagree with the principal aspect of this post. As an engineering leader what I look for when picking tooling for SaaS which essentially boils down to two things: 1) How expensive and difficult will it be to scale the Org. 2) How difficult will it be to implement product features. I attempted an Elixir startup and found that it failed at both. The language was lovely to use and very smar…

I am probably getting annoying as this is my 3rd such post in this thread but... have you posted a job ad in ElixirForum?

Also the Elixir slack has a well-watched #jobs channel, for other looking to post jobs

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

#54

Post by alberth »

dmix wrote: post #31
cpursley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand this, the ergonomics are about the same. Phoenix was inspired by Rails and Elixir by Ruby, after all. I've also worked with both and I'd say it's a match in terms of productivity.

I love Elixir and the productivity is probably real, but one big thing I've learned as a senior dev was reflected well in a recent HN post > Take the road most documented https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165328 Rails likely has an advantage of documentation given its age and all the major mature businesses using it like Shopify. A lot of newer languages have documentation/blog posts that's heavily centered arou…

> Take the road most documented

I don’t necessarily disagree with that statement.

But it can also lead you to use Java or C, because they are also massively documented & mature. And I don’t imagine that’s the desired outcome either.

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

#55

Post by pdimitar »

hansonkd wrote: post #51
pdimitar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am probably getting annoying as this is my 3rd such post in this thread but... have you posted a job ad in ElixirForum?

Yes, that is how I found the engineers I did find. I wasn't impressed by the applications I got, although who I hired was fun and talented. If I remember they were either engineers who's primary projects were actually erlang, high priced agencies, people who were elixir curious, or people have only made pet projects. The freelancers I hired had Elixir experience from a previous job, but we ended up figuring out a lot…

Yeah I agree with your last, it's true. Sorry that you didn't have better experience and I am fairly sure that I've seen your ad there and figured not to engage. :D

Though I think the biggest filter were the US working hours. I think Elixir devs are much more in the EU.

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

#56

Post by gregors »

dmix wrote: post #31
cpursley wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand this, the ergonomics are about the same. Phoenix was inspired by Rails and Elixir by Ruby, after all. I've also worked with both and I'd say it's a match in terms of productivity.

I love Elixir and the productivity is probably real, but one big thing I've learned as a senior dev was reflected well in a recent HN post > Take the road most documented https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39165328 Rails likely has an advantage of documentation given its age and all the major mature businesses using it like Shopify. A lot of newer languages have documentation/blog posts that's heavily centered arou…

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...

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

#57

Post by ken47 »

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…

I don't know if your post was a humble brag, but on Elixir + rewriting core code well, if I'm buying a software company and I know that the engineering team took their time to write good, maintainable code, that company is worth a lot more than if it the codebase is spaghetti quicksand.

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

#58

Post by zelphirkalt »

y04nn wrote: post #23
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…

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 always kept up-to-date tutorial around somewhere? I might consider it again, since I want to learn what liveview and all that is really about and how well it can make web apps etc.

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

#60

Post by kylecazar »

hansonkd wrote: post #32

I love Elixir, but I have to disagree with the principal aspect of this post. As an engineering leader what I look for when picking tooling for SaaS which essentially boils down to two things: 1) How expensive and difficult will it be to scale the Org. 2) How difficult will it be to implement product features. I attempted an Elixir startup and found that it failed at both. The language was lovely to use and very smar…

You make some good points that I don't want to detract from -- but isn't setting the bar for finding a dev at 'built and scaled a unicorn level app' a little high? Are there really that many of those
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