Elixir was a conscious choice at IDfy. The idea was to have a fast, stable, mature, developer-friendly and resource-efficient tool which can help us scale both our systems and our teams.

These teams would form the backbone on the basis of which we could turn IDfy into a tech brand to reckon with. One which stands out in the industry as a company which isn’t afraid to use the best tools just because the market doesn’t have people who have prior knowledge of those tools.

It also shows that we are willing to hire only the best talent which can learn and evolve as we grow without getting stuck to one particular technology. And that we are willing to invest in our people and their careers and don’t think of them as replaceable work-horses.

I agree that Elixir has a slight learning curve, but it really makes one a better developer since it's functional and uses immutable data structures and thus results in code which is less buggy and side-effect free.

Phoenix / BEAM makes some complex problems very easy. Things like fault tolerance, web sockets, zero-downtime deployments, hot code reloading, async tasks, caching, clustering, etc are much easier to deal with.

As the old adage goes - "No one was fired for choosing IBM." But we are young, brash and bold. We're have fire in our hearts and want to use that to lead the way to a brighter and safer future.