Confreaks
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2016
28:34 · 12K views · May 24, 2016
Brian Cardarella's RailsConf 2016 talk on why and how teams can move from Rails to Elixir and Phoenix. It covers performance gains without losing productivity and how to introduce Phoenix in an organization.
HN points Rails developers to it as a real-world case for migrating to Phoenix, backed by numbers.
7 comments from Hacker News
I'd say you really should have a look into this video . A really great presentation, including numbers and real world backup data, plus conceptual overviews.
I can't speak about experiences with Ruby/Rails since I don't use that stack but I can give you advice about both Scala and Elixir. I used to be a Java programmer and fell in love with Scala and functional programming. Scala helped me do things that I couldn't do so easily in Java in a more explicit way. However, I found doing web development with Scala to be more cumbersome than helpful but was still a great learning experience for FP in general. Since late 2015, I've been all-in on Elixir. Elixir does everything I wanted to Scala, specifically pattern matching everywhere and how powerful it is. Since Elixir uses BEAM, it's incredibly lightweight but can scale without any configuration. The community around Elixir is fantastic and helpful and everyone is growing together. Brian Cardarella (well known in the Elixir community) gave a conference talk at Rails Conf about switching from Rails to Phoenix (Elixir's goto for web) and that may be a good start to empower you to make a decision: this video . A great resource for learning Elixir if you choose that route is Programming Elixir 1.2 by Dave Thomas. It's a great book for beginners and can help with you understand Elixir semantics and functional programming.
We've moved all of our backend offerings from Rails to Elixir/Phoenix. Despite some questioning the value of anything below 100ms response times there is a lot of data backing up the idea that Elixir/Phoenix can lead to a more maintainable and more economical solution. I spoke about this recently at RailsConf: this video Don't get me wrong, I think Rails is an amazing technology but it doesn't fit the use cases and demands our clients have today.
I started watching RailsConf 2016 - Rails to Phoenix by Brian Cardarella this video as suggested in some comment yesterday and it has some stuff on whether learning Elixir is worth the time. Good talk in general. Edit link to comment thread: [LINK]
I posted this in the Elixir 1.3 thread but also relevant here. If you're looking to understand why you/your company may want to consider migrating from Rails to Phoenix you can check out my RailsConf talk on the subject this video