Foreword

As you’re holding this book, starting your journey into the world of Elixir and Phoenix, I’m very excited for you! You’re about to discover a technology stack that can help you start your projects very quickly and move forward at a steady pace. At the same time, the technology will help you deal with highly complex challenges at a large scale. With Elixir and Phoenix, you’ll get a combination of a simple-start technology and a long-run one, a perfect combination that was out of reach just a few years ago.

In the summer of 2010, I started using Erlang, the technology that’s the foundation of Elixir and Phoenix. Back then, Erlang was one of the few available languages suitable for the challenge we were facing. Erlang made it simple for us to implement a real-time push server, requiring a surprisingly small amount of code. The initial prototype, which could manage tens of thousands of simultaneous users, required about 200 lines of code!