Welcome to GigaElixir Gazette, your 5-minute digest of Elixir ecosystem news that actually matters 👋.

. WEEKLY PICKS .

🏗️ SaaS Kit "Over-Engineering" Exposes Minimalist MVP Religion: Developer shipped complete multi-tenant Phoenix system with OAuth, payments, enterprise RBAC, and real-time chat in days using a SaaS template, triggering minimalist cult outrage. The template eliminates three months of authentication hell and Stripe integration nightmares that "lean startup" mythology pretends doesn't exist.

Stop worshipping simplicity theater

🔄 Motor's Migration Strategy Exposes Rewrite Project Failures: Two years of incremental Elixir adoption delivered continuous customer value while competitors burned millions on three-year rewrites that never shipped. Motor's strangler fig approach wrapped new functionality around legacy Foswiki until Perl code died naturally.

Choose evolution over revolution

🎯 Tagged Tuple Debugging Hell Proves Structs' Hidden Value: Distributed Elixir systems reveal tagged tuple collision complexity when multiple libraries choose identical tags like {:error, :timeout}, making pattern matching unreliable. Structs eliminate this detective work through compiler-enforced module uniqueness that makes error sources immediately obvious.

Choose compiler safety over runtime mystery

🤖 Cursor AI Breaks Elixir Formatter Consistency: Teams discovering that Cursor AI's autocomplete sneaks in formatting changes that contradict team standards, especially with pipeline chains and function arguments. The AI applies its own formatting rules on top of Elixir's defaults, creating inconsistent code styles across development environments.

Audit your AI assumptions

OTP's Compatibility-First Engineering Limits Your Production Performance

The Erlang/OTP team documents their conservative approach: features with potential platform-specific issues stay disabled by default to maintain broad compatibility. Kernel polling falls into this category despite delivering massive I/O performance gains on modern systems. This engineering philosophy prioritizes avoiding support tickets over optimizing for common deployment scenarios.

The documented rationale: some platforms historically had buggy kernel polling implementations, so OTP chooses safe defaults that work everywhere over fast defaults that work on mainstream platforms. You're running artificially limited infrastructure because OTP's "just works" reputation depends on lowest-common-denominator configuration choices.

Enabling +K true reveals the performance your system already supports. Modern Linux and macOS handle thousands of concurrent connections efficiently through kernel polling, but your BEAM setup defaults to scanning inactive sockets because theoretical compatibility takes priority over production throughput.

The gap between capability and configuration means most teams never discover BEAM's true concurrency potential. They trust that defaults reflect optimal performance when those defaults actually reflect risk-averse engineering that avoids edge-case deployment problems.

Remember, for production I/O intensive systems:

1. Enable +K true and benchmark immediately - Measure your actual concurrent connection limits instead of accepting theoretical compatibility restrictions

2. Audit other conservative defaults - If OTP disables beneficial features for edge cases, question what else limits your real-world performance

3. Test platform-specific optimizations - Modern deployment targets support features that broad-compatibility defaults ignore

4. Prioritize actual over theoretical constraints - Optimize for your production environment, not hypothetical deployment scenarios

. TIRED OF DEVOPS HEADACHES? .

Deploy your next Elixir app hassle-free with Gigalixir and focus more on coding, less on ops.

We're specifically designed to support all the features that make Elixir special, so you can keep building amazing things without becoming a DevOps expert.

See you next week,

Michael

P.S. Forward this to a friend who loves Elixir as much as you do 💜