Training Developers

Adopting Elixir — by Ben Marx, José Valim, Bruce Tate (20 / 85)

👈 Chapter 2 Team Building | TOC | When Things Go Wrong 👉

Training developers for a new language is more than simply sending a few of them at a time to classes and conferences. A holistic approach is better. Early adopters are learning and deploying a new technology at the same time and you want to minimize where things can go wrong.

Once you decide to make a commitment to Elixir, your first goal should be to solve a single, focused problem. That may be a small web service, a prototype, or the sketch of a system you plan to rewrite.

It is also worth shaping your first team of Elixir developers with the future in mind. Experienced developers will be more comfortable with leading the project and working as mentors. Some may have been exposed to functional programming, which will ease the migration to Elixir, and others may have deep domain knowledge.

Remember you don’t have to immediately train everyone at once to write Elixir. At Bleacher Report, they had only two to four full-time Elixir developers in the first year. This strategy gave developers time to learn the language and get the prototype apps into production. Once you have established early success and momentum, you will be ready to engage the rest of the development staff bit by bit.

Let’s take a closer look.

Your first prototype will have a tremendous impact on the adopting of Elixir at your company. Start by establishing what the language can do and what it can’t. Since you’re reading this book, you are already on the right track. An early prototype has to balance the following aspects:

Tangible business value
You need to quickly reward the business side of the house with a quick win. That win might be fixing a problem they’re seeing in their existing application or establishing a new capability that’s cost-prohibitive using older technology.

Central enough to be seen and big enough to matter
You need a visible political win and a technical win. A trivial problem may not give you either.

Small enough to permit failure
You don’t want to bet the company on success because you didn’t have enough experience to take on such…

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