Haha! I understand what you mean. It's a long story, but the gist of it is that I had been more of a hobby-grade developer, on and off, and had a few side projects that I would occasionally boot up and play with.
You could say that I was technical enough to be dangerous, but before PriceTable I did not have any "real-life" experience (or the depth and breadth of knowledge) that comes with building and maintaining a SaaS app with paying users.
I started playing with Rails back in... 2010 I think? And about five years ago someone in the Rails community introduced me to Elixir, and I fell in love with it. So when I conceived of PriceTable, I figured, why not use Elixir for it.
To be honest, it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows. On the surface Elixir is very similar to Rails. But there are important differences. For example, Ruby is object oriented, whereas Elixir is not. I'd say it took me some time to ditch my OO habits and to start thinking of problems and solutions in terms of functional programming. Ruby also has a much larger standard library, whereas Elixir takes a plug-and-play approach: it has a small but solid foundation, and for any specialized functionality you're encouraged/required to reach for an external library.
There were other challenges too. Rails is a pretty mature ecosystem, and there are libraries and guides and examples for almost anything you can imagine. With Elixir/Phoenix, I ended up having to learn many concepts and system design principles and then implement them myself. For example, at the time I was working on the billing modules, the only Stripe library for Elixir was in a limbo, so I developed my own integration. With Ruby you'd literally install the official Stripe Ruby library and go wild.
Stuff like that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, mind you. I feel like a lot of things I took for granted in Rails (a lot of the "magic"), I had to actually learn with Elixir, and it made me a better engineer.
Elixir and Phoenix documentation is fantastic, and the community is both extremely friendly and very knowledgeable. There's an Elixir Slack that gets a fair amount of traffic, and both Jose Valim (Elixir creator) and Chris McCord (Phoenix creator) are very active both there and on the Elixir forums.
If you're interested in making the switch, I'd love to help. Shoot me an email at ege@pricetable.io!
You could say that I was technical enough to be dangerous, but before PriceTable I did not have any "real-life" experience (or the depth and breadth of knowledge) that comes with building and maintaining a SaaS app with paying users.
I started playing with Rails back in... 2010 I think? And about five years ago someone in the Rails community introduced me to Elixir, and I fell in love with it. So when I conceived of PriceTable, I figured, why not use Elixir for it.