Leveraging Elixir & Phoenix for Building Software in Auroville

Shankar Dhanasekaran, a software engineer with extensive experience in web technologies, discussed the journey Auroville took in transitioning their software infrastructure to Elixir and Phoenix. Auroville faced complexity challenges with their existing technology stack, which included a Drupal-based monolith. Shankar and his team found that Elixir offered high productivity and developer happiness, despite the city's smaller scale, making it a suitable choice for their context. Migrating to Elixir significantly increased their development velocity and reduced cost, allowing part-time developers to manage robust applications efficiently. Throughout the talk, Shankar stressed the importance of not overloading tools beyond their intended purpose and being cautious about adopting microservices without proper consideration for organizational context. The key takeaway was that small organizations might benefit more from Elixir's productivity than larger ones, counteracting the common bias that it's best suited for 'web-scale' problems. The talk also touched on future plans such as integrating Elixir in educational programs, utilizing LiveView for mobile app development, and exploring machine learning with Elixir. Finally, the speaker expressed his gratitude to the Elixir community for their shared knowledge and support.