I keep finding that the diverge-then-converge pattern is really helpful with LLMs. So, wrote a bit about it. Hope others find it helpful!

I built Phoenix SaaS Kit - a starter template for building SaaS apps with Phoenix and LiveView. Figured I'd mention the holiday sale since a few folks here have asked about it before.

It's a production-ready foundation with the boring-but-necessary stuff pre-built - auth (passwords, magic links, 2FA, OAuth), Stripe/LemonSqueezy/Polar payments, multi-tenancy with organizations, Oban jobs, LLM integrations, Tidewave setup, prebuild Cursor rules etc. The idea is you skip the infrastructure grind and get to your actual product faster.

What it's not: A magic solution. You still need to know Elixir/Phoenix. It's a starting point, not a no-code tool.

It's a one-time purchase ($72 with the discount, normally $120) and you get lifetime updates - currently working on adding some additional out of the box components. Use it on as many projects as you want.

Site: https://phoenixsaaskit.com
Just use code `U5EUNKQR` for 40% off at checkout.

Happy to answer any questions. And if you're working on something cool with Phoenix this holiday break, I'd genuinely love to hear about it - always interesting to see what people are building.

Currently using it to build defer.to and working with someone to help them build their first SaaS too.

No issues if you don't want it but it's helped a lot of people so I figured this crowd might wanna know about the discount!

Happy Holidays! 🎄

We know that platforms like WhatsApp and Discord use Elixir/Erlang for their messaging systems due to its incredible capability to handle millions of connections with low latency and minimal infrastructure. The BEAM VM (Erlang Virtual Machine) provides fault tolerance, lightweight processes, and the ability to restart failed processes seamlessly, making it ideal for real-time messaging applications.

However, Instagram’s approach to its Direct Messaging (DM) feature remains a mystery. While Instagram heavily relies on a Python/Django and PostgreSQL stack, this combination does not inherently offer the same level of fault tolerance, concurrency, and low latency as Elixir/Erlang. Given these limitations:

Python/Django would require far more servers to handle a similar workload. Django does not natively support the kind of process isolation or crash recovery that Elixir/Erlang provides. Interestingly, Instagram's engineering blogs focus heavily on features like image sharing, feed ranking, and backend optimization for posts, but they provide little detail about the Direct Messaging infrastructure. It raises questions about whether Instagram employs a hybrid or separate stack for DMs, and is Cassandra/ScyllaDB used to store these messages or PostgreSQL.

Same for Facebook Messenger it uses the MQTT protocol but what language/database is used?

i used chatgpt for help and please share your thoughts i am building a chat app and can't decide what to use as i want minimal hardware and servers and get the most out of it. plus overall tell me what do these companies use

i looked to see what the elixir forum was made of and it said it was firestorm ?

then i see it hasn't been updated since 6 years ago.

tbh this is what scares me most when going into elixir/phoenix, its all these libraries and projects that just hasn't been updated for years but people tell me they are okay to use.

edit: wow looks like some people here are toxic for asking a simple question that anyone new to elixir/phoenix would ask. didn't expect that

Last year's "Did contexts kill Phoenix?" thread stuck with me, and it ended up turning into my ElixirConf 2026 talk. I've now written it up as an article: https://www.mimiquate.com/blog/phoenix-contexts-in-the-real-world

The short version: every criticism in that post describes real pain, and I've felt all of it. But I think the pain comes from being asked to draw permanent domain boundaries on day one, when you know the least about your domain. The critics and the DDD purists share the same assumption: that boundaries get designed upfront. One side says "do it rigorously," the other says "it hurts, remove it."

What I argue instead:

• Start with one coarse context, on purpose. The condition is that you actually watch it, so it doesn't quietly turn into a 6,000-line file.

• Watch for split signals: naming drift (billing_* prefixes piling up), the "and" test, cross-context schema access, test setup drag, and the PR heatmap (all described in the article). There are also merge signals, for when you've over-split into thin pass-through contexts.

• Split incrementally, with every step shippable: facade with defdelegate → migrate callers → move behavior → deprecate → enforce with boundary.

• Phoenix 1.8 scopes settle it for me. Scopes only work because the context is the single chokepoint, so contexts are now where your authorization lives, not just a style choice.

I'm curious how this matches your experience. Has anyone split a large context without a big-bang PR? Does anyone run contexts-free in production and not miss them?

CodeBEAM America 2022 is on the way!

We are looking for passionate Elixir/ Erlang speakers that want to share their knowledge and expertise with the BEAM community.

If you feel that you have connections that might me interested please retweet this:https://twitter.com/loreniuxmr/status/1540410137101434881

Call for talks link:
https://www2.codesync.global/CodebeamamericaCFT

Hey everyone,

I've been a full stack developer for about 2.5 years — React, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, Next.js, TypeScript, Redis, AWS, Socket.IO. I've built production apps including a live multi-tenant SaaS platform.

I'm at a point where I want to level up and potentially switch focus, and I'm torn between two paths:

Option A — Elixir/Phoenix

I love the idea of functional programming, OTP, Phoenix LiveView, and building highly concurrent systems. Feels like a deeper technical bet.

Option B — AI Engineering

Building real products with LLMs, RAG, agents etc. My full stack skills seem transferable here, and the market demand looks massive.

Some context:

- I'm based in India, open to remote globally

- I'm interested in freelancing internationally alongside a job

- I want to build real, interesting things — not just chase trends

What are the honest pros and cons of each? Is either path realistic for someone coming from MERN? How long would each take to be genuinely employable?

Appreciate any real talk — especially from people who've done either of these transitions.

We are looking for people who are based in California or Mexico or Seattle, or the San Francisco Timezone (1 or 2 hours difference)

Hourly Pay: 45 USD

We are looking for someone with experience in Elixir, and considers himself a Senior Software Engineer

We build IoT Systems, this project is already build, we are also manage the software for this project, you will be integrating to our existing team

You must be experienced with Ruby on Rails, AWS instances, Docker, OTP, erlang

This position is Full Time and Remote

You must have 4 years of experience as a Software Engineer.

Please fill this form to be considered for this role:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScixI6ruz26zKs33qydOBOvqH0Z1eBXB_vVPOPPAW_17oT-eQ/viewform

Hologram v0.11 is out! :)

New to Hologram? You write the entire app in Elixir, templates, event handlers, client-side state and all. The Elixir runtime itself was rebuilt to run in the browser, so client-side code behaves exactly as it would on the server. Local-First apps are where this is heading.

This release is mostly about the browser catching up with the server. Elixir regexes were server-only until now, and handing patterns to JavaScript's RegExp doesn't hold up, so v0.11 ships a PCRE2 parser, translator and interpreter of Hologram's own. What comes back is what the BEAM would have given you.

Client errors now read like server errors too, same messages and same stacktraces, so __STACKTRACE__ finally holds real Elixir frames. Templates got more dynamic: a component module or an element tag name can now come from your data, and a whole map of attributes or props can be spread onto a tag. Plus umbrella project support and a fix for a DOM identity bug that could knock focus out of an input mid-typing.

Thanks to everyone who reported bugs and opened feature requests along the way. Several shaped this release directly and are credited by name in the blog post.

Thanks to our sponsors for making sustained development possible: Curiosum (Main Sponsor), Erlang Ecosystem Foundation (Milestone Sponsor), and our GitHub sponsors - Innovation Partner: Sheharyar Naseer, Framework Visionaries: @absowoot, Oban, Robert Urbańczyk, Moss Piglet, and all other GitHub sponsors.

Full details in the blog post: https://hologram.page/blog/hologram-v0-11

Website: https://hologram.page

I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything, but i've been trying to install this language out of interest and after an hour of work I still can't get it to run in VSCode - a task that literally takes 3 minutes with C# or other languages.

According to the docs here: https://elixir-lang.org/install.html

Which also features a typo on this line (Alternativel, use install scripts)

apt-get can work on a debian based system. So the obvious thing to do is do that, install the vscode extension and start rolling. Except if you do the completely normal thing that is referenced in the documentation ElixirLS will be broken. Apparently this doesn't install "dialyzer" and leads to a competely out of date version of Elixir and Erlang.

After some poking around it turns out asdf is what is needed. I don't want to install asdf since selecting your own outdated version of packages sounds extremely stupid and unsafe (software should be patched to prevent securtity flaws). I found this blog post which explains what to do in a way the actual documentation doesn't. https://www.pluralsight.com/resources/blog/guides/installing-elixir-erlang-with-asdf

I don't actually want to install this seperate package manager to install elixir but fine. So I follow those instructions and the result is still broken. After even more searching It turns out installing erlang using asdf requires the following dependencies, that are listed in a git repo:

https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf-erlang

apt-get -y install build-essential autoconf m4 libncurses5-dev libwxgtk3.2-dev libwxgtk-webview3.2-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libpng-dev libssh-dev unixodbc-dev xsltproc fop libxml2-utils libncurses-dev openjdk-11-jdk

I don't want to sound like a jerk but programming languages are a buyers market. I could setup C# with vastly superior tooling in minutes, I would seriously consider fixing all of this as a top priority since people are just going to bounce off the language before even giving it a chance with all this nonsense.

Anyway, I am now at the point where I can print hello world. I'm sure the language is great but everything about what I just wrote is complete trash.

Hi,

I come here with an open mind :) so no troll post attempt. But I've been investigating different tech stacks for a SaaS since JavaScript Fatigue is real. Phoenix caught my attention as I wouldn't touch RoR and Django was alright but I'm staying away from Python these days. The app I'm going to make is for internal use in our household for now, so the maintainability shouldn't matter much for a while. But I might open it to the public later.

Other than the obvious learning curve, I don't quite see Phoenix because:

1. I don't need the extra speed (JavaScript backends can be quite fast as well if used correctly, but I don't need it anyway yet).

2. I haven't really used Elixir other than reading some code but I really dislike Ruby and it gives me vibes I'm struggling to get passed. I really like functional languages though, I loved Clojure and I learn Haskell from time to time, and write my TypeScript as functional as I can. And I tend to prefer typed languages these days anyway.

3. I've heard that LiveView can have disconnects. I haven't used it, so I don't know for real or if this is fixed, but just to double check.

4. At some point, you are going to need JavaScript anyway if you are building anything with a modern UX, and then I foresee friction as I've seen every time I need to different tech stacks to interact with each other. Maybe it's not too bad, but I have the feeling that this part will be a pain.

I get the value of a stable framework that doesn't undergo breaking changes every now and then as the JavaScript ones do. But I still feel like Phoenix might not be for me. I'm really curious about trying it out but I I feel like I'll regret if I try to build something substantial. I might still stick to my original Fastify + Vite + React idea, as it's closer to what I know already, despite knowing that it'll undergo annoying upgrades in the future.

Anything I'm missing in my case?

I'm wondering if there are any rules or tips I could use to get it to work better.
For some reason it wants to put all the live view code into one giant file instead of breaking it down into smaller manage componants to build out a page.

For example I had a NFL draft and it put all the UI and functions in the same file.

When I had it make changes it would often rewrite the file from scratch breaking features that previously worked.

Any prompts or special files it can use to follow rules and not just make one giant file mess?

In this step we start optimizing our JavaScript, organize the code a bit, introduce event delegation and more.

https://algorisys.substack.com/p/build-your-own-elixir-phoenix-liveview-bfa

PS: The diffing optimization will be done next. Also not putting any images as people tend to focus more on that instead of the article itself.

PSS: People who don't like these posts and are asking me to stop, a better alternative is to downvote and don't read it :). And even better create a nice post and share and teach us all how to write this kind of tutorials.

As I understand, the amount of data stored in ets shouldn't be large as compared to a normal database.

Generally and roughly speaking, what's the recommended threshold of data stored in ets? Will 100Mb be ok? 1 Gb?

I'm building a platform that generates personalized courses on-the-fly from natural language goals. We started in Node.js but hit a wall – needed better concurrency for streaming LLM responses, fault isolation per user session, and horizontal scaling without complexity. Migrated to Elixir in two weeks. BEAM's actor model + Phoenix Channels made real-time content generation way cleaner.

Later, we realized our approach was fundamentally wrong. We created a complete course outline in advance, but the system was unable to respond to user feedback if they didn't understand something. Rewrote to gap-first streaming generation – assess what they don't know, generate only that, deliver as it's created. Elixir's process isolation let us hot-swap the logic without a full rewrite.

Questions for you:
- How do you handle prompt versioning in production?
- And honestly – when do you think the AI bubble pops?

We're betting on sustained demand for personalized learning but curious about sentiment. Happy to discuss Elixir patterns for LLM orchestration or the chaos of last-minute pivots.

I was first going to anonymously post this, but I'm gonna stand behind my words and not cower to the likes of these. And also if this is the precedence then I don't want to be a part of such a community.

I won't be attending any conferences whose hosts uphold bigotry and division as seen by the Christian/Republican base in this country.

Justus Eapen who is opening and closing is very open about his bias in our community and thinks people are fascists for wearing masks per his own words on Twitter.

Hospitality in this country is dead. The government and their mask-fascist enablers have killed it. Obnoxious signs everywhere. Normalized rudeness. These are the culture now. Not surprising with the preponderance of unbelief. - Justus Eapen

Why the fuck are we giving people like this a pedestal in our community if they constantly proclaim their discontent and hate for others who do not uphold his dogmatic views?

Then there are the obnoxious “wearing is caring” propaganda pieces littered everywhere as if the guests have been living in a cave the last year - Justus Eapen

His thoughts about Burgerking standing up for the LGBQ community.

Trash food, trash politics. - Justus Eapen

https://twitter.com/justuseapen/status/1402289139953905667

Just saying he has a lot to say about people outside of his little bubble.

Now granted you could say the same about me being anti Christian/Republican, but I'm not opening for a conference either, and it's almost always in response to their initial assault on society.

This community is more than just programming. It's a place for open and creative minds to come together. There is no place in our community for this kind of rhetoric from people who we are granting a pedestal in our community.

Honestly, this is the best you can do Elixir Wizards? FML. You can count me out this conf.