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

. WEEKLY PICKS .

🔬 LiveDebugger 0.5.0 Ships Dead LiveView Inspection: Software Mansion releases major update adding crashed LiveView debugging, async assign tracking, and stream operation inspection. New resource usage page shows LiveView process consumption behind the scenes. Assigns inspector now tracks full history of value changes with size measurements to catch heavy structures early. Dead LiveViews appear in debugger making failure case debugging significantly easier. Async loading support and stream debugging provide deeper LiveView internals insight than previous versions.

View the demo

🌐 AtomVM Brings Elixir to Browser via WebAssembly: Code BEAM Europe talk reveals AtomVM running in browsers through WebAssembly compilation. Developers can now run IEx sessions, compile Elixir code, and spawn GenServers entirely client-side without server round-trips. Game of Life demo runs each cell as supervised GenServer communicating with neighbors-full OTP supervision trees in your browser. Performance needs work, standard library currently 3MB+ download, but production Elixir REPL on elixir-lang.org homepage becomes possible.

Watch the talk

🎭 Freyja Algebraic Effects Library Enables Serializable Coroutines: New library brings algebraic effects system to Elixir with serializable, resumable computations. EffectLogger effect captures structured log of all effects emitted by computation. Computations suspend, serialize to JSON, deserialize, and resume on different machines. Built-in effects include State, Reader, Throw, Coroutine. EctoFx effect separates domain logic from database-same code works with real Postgres or test stubs. Advanced pattern for developers building workflow engines or debugging production failures through replay.

Read the documentation

💜 Hologram Seeks Sustainable Sponsorship After Three Years Full-Time: Full-stack Elixir framework automatically transpiling Elixir to JavaScript needs funding to continue development. Creator working 60+ hour weeks balancing contract work with framework maintenance. Production deployments exist, community leaders endorse it, but sustainability requires sponsorship. Framework brings Elixir to browser natively without separate frontend language. Community support needed to maintain momentum and prevent maintainer burnout.

Read the sponsorship appeal

💡 Govee Smart Lights Elixir Package Published: Wrapper library for controlling Govee smart lights through Elixir. List devices, toggle power, set brightness, change color temperature, set RGB colors. Built because nothing similar existed in ecosystem. Future plans include better error reporting, device caching, more light effects, possibly local LAN support. Small IoT contribution expanding Elixir beyond web servers into home automation territory.

Check Hex package

You Mastered Elixir Syntax But Companies Still Won't Hire You

A developer with 15 years experience, Fortune 500 credentials (PayPal, Chewy), and 50+ languages under their belt asked Reddit: "I want to become an Elixir god. Where do I start?" They'd read SICP, done all the exercises, built toy projects. They knew the syntax cold. The community's response revealed an uncomfortable truth: syntax mastery is table stakes, not the game.

The first reply cut straight to it: "Read the Erlang thesis. Unlearn everything you know because your thinking is corrupted by OOP. Do a project touching everything in Elixir because it inherits from 40+ years of Erlang. The most valuable thing isn't the code itself-it's the way of accomplishing things." Another developer chimed in: "99% of the time knowing OTP is the most important aspect. I wrote two macros in ten years and never touched metaprogramming again."

The pattern repeated across dozens of responses. Everyone pointed to the same book: "Designing for Scalability with Erlang/OTP" by Cesarini and Vinoski. Not Metaprogramming Elixir. Not Phoenix guides. The OTP book that teaches you fault-tolerant system design, supervision trees, process models, and distributed computing primitives. One developer: "I read it in my early Elixir days roughly 10 years ago and it changed everything how I think about software. Before Elixir I had almost 20 years experience with other tech."

But here's where it gets real. A 60-year-old developer with 21 years professional experience dropped the hard truth: "Elixir is by far the best programming experience I've had in my 21 years. But my manager tells me I should go polyglot to make job hunting easier. My peers are depressed about the Elixir market. After 10 years of existence, the language is often overlooked by tooling and big companies." They've watched Elixir killed at two jobs. Companies claim they can't find Elixir developers. Developers claim they can't find Elixir jobs. The disconnect is real.

The hiring process reveals the mismatch. Take-home tests and code challenges dominate. Companies filter candidates through generic algorithm puzzles instead of deep Elixir conversations. Experienced developers get offers from other companies before the Elixir shop finishes their process. C-suite sees "hard to hire" and pivots back to Rails or Node. One developer: "We repeatedly missed out on candidates because they got offers elsewhere before we finished our process. This translated into not keeping Elixir staffing levels and executives eventually decided it was too hard to find Elixir devs."

The real Elixir mastery path isn't what you think. Syntax takes weeks. OTP takes years. But the ultimate challenge isn't technical-it's adoption. Learn OTP deeply. Build and operate real systems, not toy projects. Understand supervision trees, clustering, distribution failure modes. Master GenServer, GenStage, Broadway. Then fight the real fight: getting companies to embrace Elixir and stick with it when hiring gets hard. The ecosystem needs developers who can both build excellent systems and convince executives those systems are worth the hiring investment.

Read the full thread

Remember, for Elixir mastery:

1. OTP mastery trumps syntax tricks – Supervision trees and fault tolerance matter more than metaprogramming or Phoenix generators

2. Build and operate, not just build – Toy projects teach syntax, production systems teach OTP under real failure conditions

3. The hiring process kills adoption – Take-home tests and algorithm puzzles filter experienced Elixir devs who get offers elsewhere first

4. Real mastery means fighting for adoption – Technical excellence means nothing if you can't convince companies Elixir is worth the hiring effort

. TIRED OF DEVOPS HEADACHES? .

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See you next week,

Michael

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