Hacker News Reader

Comment by cultofmetatron | Hacker News Reader

A lot of points made here is also is why I believe Phoenix framework is the BEST stack for building mvps in 2024.

1. you get concurrency and pubsub built in with no external dependancies.

2. postgres suppport out of the box. our entire deployment is just phoenix + postgres

3. creating a microservice is easy. create a genserver, add it to your application.ex -> DONE. no need to create a seperate repo. its already able to send and receieve messages from other parts of your monolith using the built in pubsub system

4. Oban, the background worker library uses postgres.

end result is that as a small team, we are able to knock out a lot of features and scale it without any of the complexity most startups have. Its been 4 years and only now we are starting to consider bringing in an external message queue.

View on HN

I feel like it is significantly harder to learn elixir and phoenix as a newbie. The learning curve is very steep owing to the fact that good learning resources seems to be scarce, maybe not for elixir but definitely for phoenix. I have been trying to grasp it for a month now, but an up-to-date resource is nowhere to be found and oh, please don't tell me to go read the documentation. It is not meant to be read by beginners. Almost everyone in the community recommends the prag studio course but $200?? I can't afford it XD

>The learning curve is very steep owing to the fact that good learning resources seems to be scarce

thats a fair assessment and I sympathize. I'm at the point where being able to hire devs is a concern of mine. we just hired a new elixir dev to join my team and it was difficult finding people with experience. We had to go though a recruiter who specializes in elixir.

That said, I encourage you to not give up. I became an elixir dev after 9 years of working with javascript and nodejs. Personally I found it pretty easy to learn (was building apps in it as quickly as I could in nodejs after jsut 2 weeks). Its a magnitude order easier to learn than rust (though thats admittedly a low bar).

> I have been trying to grasp it for a month now, but an up-to-date resource is nowhere to be found

This is definitly an issue I admit. once you know elixir, you know the idioms and picking up the newest changes is pretty easy but I remember how it was to be a begginer. would love your input on what would be needed for a learning resource as I have been thinking about writing a book on phoenix for newbies.

As far as getting into elixir, if you have experience with javascript, I reccomend checking out immutable-js. the data structures are basicly elixir's data structures but in javascript. my experience ins scheme and functional style js were a huge help for me when I was learning elixir.

> Personally I found it pretty easy to learn (was building apps in it as quickly as I could in nodejs after jsut 2 weeks)

Makes me feel better! I have also successfully converted one of my java spring-boot app to phoenix though I am not sure how efficient it is. It definitely involves way more magic than spring for sure! Maybe its just quite hard for me to make the jump from imperative/OOPs way of coding to the functional way.

> would love your input on what would be needed for a learning resource as I have been thinking about writing a book on phoenix for newbies.

I would love to help! I think the harder part of making such a resource is updating and staying on par with the framework devs.

> It definitely involves way more magic than spring for sure!

Elixir and Phoenix really strive to keep the "magic" to a minimum. Bending your mind the functional way instead of the OOP way, and learning how Elixir macros really helps dispel the magic and realize it's less excessive cleverness as Ruby/Rails often indulges in and more just the benefits of FP.

Having on-boarded quite a few jr developers with no previous experience with Elixir (and have purchased the prag studio course for most of them) I've heard that many of them also really enjoyed

https://joyofelixir.com/

and

https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/basics/basics/

And while I haven't watched it - there's a free code camp tutorial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiIgm_yaoOA

From looking around there seems to be a host of free videos on YT as well as many books on elixir/phoenix. Also, I believe prag studio gives away 1/2 of that initial course for free, probably enough to get you started.

> Also, I believe prag studio gives away 1/2 of that initial course for free

If I have read their website right, they say only first three modules are free, the whole course has 35 modules.

> there seems to be a host of free videos on YT as well as many books on elixir/phoenix

You are right about the videos, though I am not so sure about books. Phoenix 1.7 doesn't seem to have any good books for it at all.

hmmm, yes you are correct. I thought they used to offer more for free but maybe my memory is off. Apologies.

You are also right about that the Phoenix book needs an update, they changed A LOT with the way they structure code in the last release. Which, you don't have to use btw, you can still use the older methods. The major differences are here https://elixircasts.io/upgrading-to-phoenix-1.7 which I can honestly understand the pain a new developer feels when the books are out of date.

I'd still consider going through an older book, you'll learn 90-95% of the same thing.

> I'd still consider going through an older book, you'll learn 90-95% of the same thing.

Seconded. I have the book, and it's pretty easy to understand where the differences are. And worth learning the pre 1.7 Phoenix because a lot of the changes thereafter make so much more sense when you know the pain points that motivated them.

You could try my new LiveView course: http://phoenixliveview.com/

If you have a Rails background then I have another course specifically for you: https://phoenixonrails.com/

Or click here to buy both together: https://arrowsmithlabs.com/checkout?bundle_id=1 ;)

</selfpromo>

Reply on news.ycombinator.com