Two years of Elixir at the Outline | Hacker News Reader

Two years of Elixir at the Outline

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15 pointsdavydog1877 comments

Dave and I started building this app together two years ago -- we both came from different ecosystems (Dave from Node, me from Rails). It's been incredibly rewarding for us to be on Elixir/Phoenix.

There's so much more to say about why Elixir is a great choice for webdev (I love Rails but probably wouldn't go back). This post gets to some of the high-level stuff we've learned -- happy to answer any questions folks have!

I feel much the same way. I might still pick Ruby/Rails or Django/Python if what I'm building is easily solved by the ecosystem, in a way that it isn't by hex.pm, but I'd probably err on the side of Elixir.

Thank you for the write-up! When starting The Outline, did you investigate other languages for building the system, or were you set on Elixir from the start? What were these other options you evaluated (if any)? Which aspects of Elixir convinced you that it was the right choice?

I evaluated a few things at the beginning. I was previously using Ruby/Rails and Node.js, and Rails was my go-to for full-stack webdev.

There was some interest in building a headless WordPress site, but the limitations on database design and performance led me back to a monolith. I have a general preference for monoliths when time is tight (time is always tight) -- the things you get for free are very helpful: deploy/rollback, DB migrations, API versioning, local dev workflow, CI, among others.

I'd deployed a couple small Elixir apps at my previous job, as well as some toy projects in Elixir/Phoenix. I've played with JVM languages like Scala and Clojure, I've tried to learn Haskell about five times. Elixir had a great developer experience story (a couple people can build a nontrivial app in ~weeks). It's on par with Ruby/Rails. We went all-in around September 2016, launching in early December of 2016.

Edit: I should have mentioned, I'm the CTO of The Outline.

Was there any particular reason why you didn't choose Clojure? From what I've heard, and based on my own experience, it scratches many of the same itches that Elixir does, especially in comparison to Node/Rails.

Personally I went for Elixir instead of Clojure for a bunch of reasons, but I'm very curious to hear how others feel about this.

i admired your design and content's layout long ago. I didn't know it was developed by Elixir. thanks for the site and nice write up. keep sharing your Elixir experiences with us, you know there are very few articles about it.

Author here! Would love to hear which topics y'all would like to hear more about.

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