The root of this decision lays a few years earlier in my life. Actually at that time that was not about Elixir.

At that time I’ve heard some noise in the air about Erlang language. People were talking here and there how productive the language is. How effectively it can use all the cores of the CPU and all that stuff.

Some people were worshiping it. Providing examples of how perfectly does Erlang works for current web-development reality. The approach of how telephony applications are working is quite similar to how web-applications are working now.

So I’ve put Erlang into my “Learn it later” list to wait its time.

Then, after some time, Elixir appeared on the horizon. At that time I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it.

The years were passing by until I’ve visited EURUKO in 2016. Where José Valim the creator of Elixir was giving a talk about (guess what) Elixir programming language. The speech was so fascinating that I said to myself: “Ok. I have definitely to try it out”.

Once I’ve got back home from the conference, I’ve ordered two books: “Programming Elixir”, “Programming Phoenix” and a course on Udemy. So I was ready. And Elixir was waiting for me, for almost a year.

Yeah, yeah. I had other stuff to do. You may hear those excuses all the time from other people.

So now it’s about time to start.

First of all, there should be a plan. A good plan is a half of the work. Having a plan would also help to measure the progress.

I like the idea of skill assessment. Imagine you are going to pass an exam in the school or university. Would it be much easier for you to prepare for the exam if you know the questions you should answer in advance? Once you know all these questions you can sit a find the answers to them.

So I’ve sat a little bit and look into books, courses and some other pages about Elixir and Phoenix to build a list of skills I would like or need to learn. I keep it as a Trello board which you can find here.

Of course, this list is not 100% complete. At least because my knowledge about its items is limited for now. And they are just names and titles for me. But I am going to update the list with action points and links to resources on my way.

I will be honest, I have never tried this approach before. That is the first time I’m doing that experiment and I have no idea how will it work. Anyway, I have a good feeling about that. At least I will not waste time thinking about what should I learn next.

Stay in touch.