Introduction

I remember working on the first production-facing Elixir application I wrote—it was a real-time application to drive an innovative new feature for our platform. Excitement, curiosity, and a good bit of nervousness led me through that project. It was a trial by fire as the application would receive more requests per minute than any other part of our platform. It still stands today without much involvement needed over the past years.

I have gotten to work on many other real-time applications since that first project. The lessons I learned were sometimes hard to come by—a critical piece of the application would fail, applications would overuse resources like CPU and RAM, or I would code something in a nonoptimal way. However, I was able to leverage the strong foundations of Elixir and Phoenix to solve any problem that appeared. This book aims to collect the experience that I have gained working with Elixir and Phoenix Channels over the last several years and distill it into the parts that matter most.

Elixir has changed the way that I think about, design, and code applications. The creators, community, and libraries empower me to think about code with a fresh perspective. My time with Elixir has been filled with enthusiasm, to say the least. Throughout this book, I hope to share that enthusiasm with you.