We’re building draft. There you’ll find why, here you’ll find how.

We’re building draft using Elixir although we had very limited exposure to Elixir or Erlang beforehand. Partly because we wanted to learn a new language, partly because we believe it’s the best tool for the job.

Elixir community is awesome, but Elixir being quite new there’s always room for more resources, particularly short tips and tricks.

We’re learning Elixir using all available resources, to each their favorite. Some of us bought books (there are truly excellent ones), some of us mainly rely on blogs, some of us lurk on IRC or Twitter, all of us learn by doing and reading the docs.

What we noticed is that complicated things are often well documented but “easy” things are not. The Elixir community being mostly constituted of seasoned software developers or enthusiasts, it kind of makes sense: people write about the interesting problem they face and how they solve them instead of taking the time to write short articles about how to achieve specific things that are probably too obvious to them. I don’t blame them -the language documentation is quite good, there a good amount of fascinating blog posts and projects around the language- but I see it as an opportunity.

An opportunity to blog about what we learn while learning (and while building a half-serious software project), an opportunity to contribute to Elixir ecosystem, and a good reason to share what we sometimes spent far too long trying to figure out how to do. Search engines are essential tools for programmers, but sometimes you come from a different tech stack, paradigm or language and can’t find the keywords that click. Perhaps, if we use the unsuccessful keywords which led us to not finding what we were looking for, it can be helpful to others?