🔗 Areas of Improvement for Elixir

As I’ve mentioned on this blog previously, I’ve worked in Ruby prior to joining Brex and really enjoyed the experience so I was excited to learn Elixir. Even before joining I took some time to play around with and learn the language so I could hit the ground running. Prior to my professional career, I took a course in college entitled “Data Structures and Functional Programming” where we learned about functional programming concepts while coding in OCaml. So even before Elixir I had some experience with functional languages and rather enjoyed the different programming paradigm and thought process.

While at Brex, I was a member of a volunteer team dedicated to maintaining Elixir libraries and documentation as well as onboarding and upleveling engineers in Elixir. I developed and led an onboarding class around Elixir general information and Brex custom Elixir knowledge which was given to hundreds of onboarded engineers. While I no longer get to code in Elixir in my day to day work at Brex, I always enjoyed programming in it and wanted it to be loved and enjoyed by others.

Nevertheless, it’s been about two years since my last active Elixir development at Brex. Since then I have reflected back on some of the shortcomings of the language and our guidance around it. I touched on some of this in my previous post on Elixir Learnings and Hiring but will try to cover some new topics. I hope this post can be utilized by the community and other adopters to ensure Elixir’s future success.