Real-Time Phoenix

Introduction

I remember working on the first production-facing Elixir application I wrote—it was a real-time application to drive an innovative new feature for our platform. Excitement, curiosity, and a good bit of nervousness led me through that project. It was a trial by fire as the application would receive more requests per minute than any other part of our platform. It still stands today without much involvement needed over the past years.

I have gotten to work on many other real-time applications since that first project. The lessons I learned were sometimes hard to come by—a critical piece of the application would fail, applications would overuse resources like CPU and RAM, or I would code something in a nonoptimal way. However, I was ...