The Elixir Year: A Technical Sabbatical

Dec 26, 2024

TL;DR - Skip to the syllabus

Due to a very peculiar situation¹, I'm spending all of 2025 on a technical sabbatical to learn Elixir inside & out. I've used Python for more than a decade to build some delightfully capable real-time systems, and now feels like a good time to level up. Elixir is the future, man.

Below you'll find my EoY proficiency targets, quarterly focus areas, key learning resources, and more. If you're an elixir expert or have technical sabbatical experience, please share your thoughts on how I can set myself up for success.

EDIT: Huge thanks to everyone that's commented on this from bluesky & reddit, your feedback is so darn appreciated 🫶

Why Elixir?

Nothing I can say here will do a better job than this presentation by Saša Jurić, author of Elixir in Action. Consider this your invitation to hit terminal velocity down the rabbit hole 🕳️

End of Year Objectives

• Devour the syllabus, excrete excellence
• Deploy, maintain, and monetize 1 production-grade application
• Contribute to 2 open source projects
• Create and maintain 1 (useful) Elixir package
• Extensively document experiences for others to follow
• Attend 12 Week Recurse Center Batch
• Launch independent technical consultancy
• Bonus: Complete 2025 Advent of Code! 🎁

Syllabus

Q1: Foundations

Core Elixir

Hello World and all that jazz. I’ll be learning the language fundamentals, standard library, and the basics of OTP.

Key Resources

• 📕 Elixir in Action
• 📕 Grokking Simplicity
• 📕 The Pragmatic Programmer
• 👨‍💻 Exercism.org Elixir Track
• 📺 Elixir & OTP (Pragmatic Studio)

Q1 Project

A useful Elixir package hosted on Github with solid documentation, a contribution guide, hex package, and everything needed to learn the ins & outs of running elixir releases.

Q2: Web Dev with Phoenix Liveview

The goal is to learn how to use Elixir to build awesome real-time websites. Since Phoenix Liveview hit 1.0 a few weeks ago, by March 2025 there should be plenty of updated tutorials and content. I'm also throwing in the Ash Framework as I think it'll help me manage the stack as I expand past the core of the language.

Key Resources

• 📕 Programming Phoenix Liveview
• 📕 Learn you some Erlang Real Good
• 📺 Elixir for Programmers 2
• 📺 Full Stack Phoenix (Pragmatic Studio)
• 📺 Learn Phoenix Liveview

Q2 Project

Probably a Phoenix Liveview app hosted on fly.io; something I can show my friends and get the hang of pushing updates to. The specifics will likely coalesce later.

Q3: Systems, Scale, & Distributed Engineering

Here’s where things scale up; from localhost to infinity & beyond (but mostly fly.io). The goal is to integrate the prior lessons into the distributed engineering realm. The BEAM VM is going to be front & center, while also deepening the rest of the stack. I picked up a pretty cool “Build an MVP in Elixir” course for Black Friday this year that integrates all the above, plus LemonSqueezy for payments, Tailwind CSS, and other extras for product engineering goodness. I’ll take some time to dig into more advanced Erlang concepts to understand the BEAM better with two free books.

Key Resources

• 👨‍💻 DockYard Academy
• 📕 Erlang in Anger
• 📺 Build an MVP with Elixir

Q3 Project

1 Production-Grade app (with at least two nodes to form and administer a BEAM cluster). Since my Q4 goal is about money (see below), I'll be using this project to attempt some monetization/pro features to dip my toe in the SaaS world. Goal: A single $5 sale of anything. 1 customer.

Q4: Recurse Center OR Business

If I get accepted into the Fall 2 Batch of the Recurse Center, that'll obviously negate whatever I write below. I really hope I get in. If I don't:

This is where things get real. I’ll be targeting production-grade systems design & maintenance (deployment strategies, monitoring & observability, performance optimization, security best practices, etc.) to round out the year. The theme will be integration, of all the knowledge gained over the past year.

Hopefully by this point I’ll feel more than capable of turning my knowledge into employment and will take some time to understand how best to set myself up for whatever may follow (technical consultancy, founding a startup, joining a startup, or something else entirely?).

Key Resources

• 📕 Engineering Elixir Applications
• 👨‍💻 Fly.io Gossip Glomers Distributed Challenges

Q4 Project

• A clear vision of next steps for 2026 (how am I going to make money from this?)
• A lot of excellent blog posts from the past year, organized and ready for sharing
• Continued contributions to favorite projects/repos
• Advent of Code challenges! 🎁

Bonus: Learning & Documentation Strategy

I'll be maintaining a private scratch pad in Google Docs as a Learning Log to capture daily notes and insights, code snippets, experiments, questions and roadblocks, etc. From that raw material, I plan on publishing refined blog posts here that'll cover:

• Course and book reviews
• Technical deep-dives on learned concepts
• Project walkthroughs
• Monthly progress updates

My goal is to transform my lessons & journey into useful resources for others considering a similar path.

Fin

Thanks for making it this far! I’ll be updating this post over the year as I progress. Check back in a couple months, or subscribe via RSS to get more regular reviews of the various video courses, books, and other resources as they get completed.

#elixir-year