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Comment by __sr__ | Hacker News Reader

Is Elixir being used extensively outside Silicon Valley? Can you list some well known success stories? Looking at job listings and open source projects, it doesn’t seem to be widely used. In fact, I don’t know anyone outside Silican Valley who has built anything non-trivial in Elixir.

I am not saying it is bad. But I’d like to know about it before I dive in.

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Not publicly documented, but CNN's ingest scheduling system (basically the backend that says "at this time, record this incoming feed, on this encoder, associate it with this metadata", and all the ensuing complexity that comes with finding a free encoder, responding in the event of hardware failure, allowing users to plan recordings that there isn't space for, etc) is in Erlang. Because it needed to be bullet proof; if it goes down, CNN doesn't record incoming video.

Had Elixir been mature at the time, we would have used it instead.

That's interesting. Do you guys have to build a lot of custom tooling in TV? Are CNN's requirements particularly novel compared to other stations with live programming and remote feeds?

I've since left, but yes and no. Video at that scale requires some unique hardware, which in turn requires some unique software. But for broadcasters of that scale, many of the problems are the same.

We actually had, prior to this system, been relying on one built by a French company, that cost hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, per year in licensing. Updates were infrequent, often included regressions, but it mostly worked.

This started as a way to get some of the smaller bureaus to have some basic functionality, and grew into a system that was deployed to every bureau, eventually replacing what we had in Atlanta (that previously mentioned system). It was extremely popular, and the business stakeholders even characterized it as the biggest success they've had from our department.

One of our group's VPs showed it at an industry trade show, just offhandedly, and an exec from another broadcaster indicated regret of having just signed a deal to purchase the aforementioned system above, rather than attempting to roll their own (seeing the success CNN had).

It's not a key differentiator for CNN, but they also don't have software sales as a core competency. So they have basically best of breed software sitting there unnoticed. shrug C'est la vie.

It also has the benefit of, since it's Erlang, largely just working without issue. There's not many there still with Erlang knowledge, but that isn't really much issue for another 20 years if it continues just working without issue.

The ones that come to mind immediately are Discord, Pinterest, Teachers Pay Teachers, Bleacher Report.

After a quick Google I also discovered this nifty site: https://elixir-companies.com/

Cabify, an Uber competitor from Spain operating mostly in South/Central America and recently valued at 1.5B has been moving from a primarily Ruby stack to Elixir over the past year.

Why exclude the success stories in Silicon Valley - seems like an arbitrary decision to exclude Discord say or Pinterest?

It does seem there aren't that many very big companies outside of Silicon Valley using Elixir but maybe that's a factor of Silicon Vally having the vast majority of winners period.

Well, I don’t live in Silicon Valley, and as a result, the company I work for is not a Silicon Valley company. If I am going to convince the management to invest in Elixir, I need to be able to answer questions like this. Pretty much everyone I have spoken to about Elixir, inevitably brings up this point.

I don't understand why you make the distinction between Silicon Valley and not Silicon Valley because where something is done makes absolutely zero difference as to if it's a good idea to use software or not.

If there was a text editor that you thought was good but was only in use in Silicon Valley would you still recommend it? I've never ever in my life discounted a piece of software because it was only in use in Silicon Valley.

Maybe you could expand on the argument because I don't understand it clearly!

I've built major crawling infrastructure at [#paid](http://hashtagpaid.com) with Elixir.

My anecdatum. :)

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