Efficiency With Elixir

The author discusses their experience working with Elixir at their current company, Vody, and compares it to their previous role in a startup with a microservices architecture. They argue that a small team of Elixir engineers can outperform a larger team using Node and Python microservices by reducing code complexity and infrastructure needs. Elixir's design, leveraging the Erlang VM, provides fault tolerance and scalability benefits similar to microservices but without the associated overhead. The author highlights the efficiency of Elixir in maintaining fewer code dependencies and reducing infrastructure costs, such as AWS bills, while enabling rapid planning and execution with a smaller, skilled team. They note that while no software solution is perfect, Elixir has proven to be an effective and elegant choice for handling large-scale data pipelines, offering a balance of performance and simplicity that other languages and architectures may not achieve.