From Ruby to Elixir

Build Cities, Not Skyscrapers

The traditional model of building applications—especially web applications—is single-stack-oriented. This means that applications work from an entry point (web request, CLI command, background worker, and so on) and execute code in a single stack or process to achieve their purpose. This programming model is clearly the dominant one in the Ruby community.

This traditional model has its benefits, but it’s an uphill battle to work against the grain. It’s difficult to colocate web and background workers for cost optimizations. And it’s near impossible to create in-memory data structures that are shared across the entire application. Effectively, you end up writing applications a certain way, even if it’s not how you ...