Elixir’s main strengths are:

1. Transparent parallelism, e.g. Task and Flow. Try and make a project that ingests data from public datasets, in parallel, and also stores them somewhere after processing, again in parallel.

2. Metaprogramming. If you go through the Exercism.IO’s Elixir track you’ll have plenty of opportunities for that, e.g. in the Roman numerals translation module.

3. Ecto and Phoenix (and Absinthe for GraphQL). Try and couple some of your hobby / portfolio projects to a Phoenix app that persists to (and loads from) a MySQL or PostgreSQL database through Ecto.

I personally am immune to “falling in love” with a language syntax anymore so I am just looking for what are the main benefits that a language and its ecosystem bring to the table. If you can demonstrate knowledge and good practices in those and put them in a public GitHub portfolio – even if it’s only 2-3 good, solid projects (and they don’t even have to be big!) – you’ll be in a much better place than most candidates.

Start somewhere easy or an area that you’re interested in most perhaps? Either that or the area in which you hope to get a job?

Luckily we have lots of books and courses about Elixir so if you’re seriously about getting a job in it, I would read/do as many of them as possible - I reckon a prospective employer would like that

I’d love it! PM me with me details. I just can’t find any time ever to scan for the discounts of books…