The Elixir Year: Month 1 Review
This post is the 1st entry in The Elixir Year Series.
After much excitement & anticipation of beginning my technical sabbatical with a polished syllabus, this first month has felt like a borderline failure to launch. I've only gotten through 8.2% of the Elixir Track in Exercism, or 13 of the 159 challenges, and faced a great deal of adversity right out the gate. Follow me as I point to everywhere it hurts on the doll.
📦 Boxing Challenges 🥊
Since leaving Automattic in October and bootstrapping 2025 with my savings, I need to cut costs wherever possible. My lease was up in January, so I found another apartment that saves me $600/mo, which allows me to afford health, vision, and dental insurance.
Therefore, all of January has been cardboard flavored with the bitter aftertaste of busywork.
The first week of January was devoted to packing, the second to moving & cleaning the old place, the third to rebuilding, and the fourth to existential panic over the difficulty of finding focus. As an ardent follower of Deep Work, my ability to channel flow has been severed. It's SO hard to learn when your life is strewn about and all your routines have been reset.
🩼 Awarded atrophy, not a trophy 🏆
Folks, I'm struggling with the very basics of programming. I'm roaringly rusty. As a senior software engineer, I spent far more time in Zoom & Google Docs than my IDE, and the last two years of my employment were focused on infrastructure (Ansible, Terraform, Nomad/Docker, etc.) with only a few refactors or bug fixes a month where I'd see any python.
My bright red Stanley tools of the trade were dulled & corroded by the sandblaster of time. 🌬️🧰
Furthermore, python is the only language I know well enough to do professional work with. I'm lucky that it happens to be a very lucrative language, but I now realize how big of a liability that is after trying to learn another language in an entirely different paradigm. Since Elixir is functional, my progress was quickly halted upon reaching multi-clause functions, pattern matching, guards, and recursion. It feels like I'm a total CS beginner again.
🤨 Wot do❓
Here's my plan to dust myself off and get back on my feet:
- I picked up a copy of Learn Functional Programming with Elixir by Ulisses Almeida as it's written for devs coming from an imperative/OOP language. This should help me bridge the paradigms faster. I've also got Grokking Simplicity in the cart should I need additional help nailing down FP concepts.
- This weekend is devoted to rebuilding my office as a dedicated flow space.
- I've begun asking the Elixir Code Whisperer GPT to generate quizzes that I can practice on until I'm certain I understand a concept.
- I'm meditating, journaling, and reminding myself that being fiscally vulnerable and intellectually humbled is part of the journey; this is supposed to be hard.
📖 Month 2 Focus 🎧
My focus for February is to continue refining my daily practices and building flow channels into my life. I've found the best possible resources to learn elixir & FP fundamentals and will do my best to absorb all the knowledge contained within. Below is a list of the Chosen Ones for this part of my journey:
- Elixir in Action
- Learn Functional Programming with Elixir
- Official Elixir Docs
- Exercism
- Elixir Code Whisperer GPT
Thanks for following along; it's comforting to know I'm not alone in this.