Readable Code, Meaningful Work: My Elixir Journey from Sabbatical to Startup

Posted by Petros Amoiridis
May 05, 2025

4 min read

I am not an extrovert. All my life, I’ve been fighting my introvert self. So, how have I ended up being a people manager, leading the Thessaloniki Ruby Meetup for years, and having just founded Greece |> Elixir?

I don’t know. All I know is I only do things I enjoy. I only do things that I see having some impact.

I fell in love with Elixir around 2018 when I saw José Valim, its creator, talking about it. The first thing that drew me was his positive energy. You almost never see him being negative. The second thing was Elixir’s readability. José, coming from the Ruby world, decided to create a language that reads like Ruby.

Here’s a function in Ruby:

def hello(name)

  puts "Hello #{name}"

end

Here’s the equivalent in Elixir:

def hello(name) do

  IO.puts("Hello #{name}")

end

Almost the same. So coming from years of using Ruby, I was like, what can go wrong? Well, the first shock was going from years of object oriented programming, to functional programming. But once things clicked, I almost never wanted to go back. The combination of Ruby like syntax, and the functional paradigm, allows for creating one of the most readable code I was ever able to.

You may ask, does it matter now that we are living through the AI revolution? Well, as long as we still read code, it does matter. We may write less code, but we still have to read it if we want to remain professional and responsible people.

In 2022, I quit a long career in leadership positions. I wanted to go back to creating digital products with my own hands. I ended up taking a 2 year sabbatical during which I got a much needed rest, learned Rust, played with Elixir, tried my own projects, and eventually started looking for a job.

Ideally, I would find something related to Elixir. I was even pretty close at one occasion. I was learning the hard way, that the Elixir community was non-existent in Greece. I wanted to find Elixir enthusiasts here but I couldn’t find them.

What does one do when they cannot find something? They create it. So, I founded Greece |> Elixir, an effort to promote the Elixir programming language in Greece. Part of the effort is finding Elixir enthusiasts and bring them together. Our community approaches 40 people already! A mix of people that already use Elixir in Greece (who knew), and people that want to learn more. The community is by invitation, and you are welcome to subscribe and receive an invitation.

Elixir is perfect because, along with Phoenix and LiveView, it falls under the one-person-framework category. A killer combination when paired with AI and agenting development. It allows independent developers or very small teams (2-3 folks), to create what would take 10+ people of different backgrounds (backend, frontend, full stack etc.). Not only that, but it also cuts hosting costs tremendously, and increase speed and resilience thanks to the BEAM (Erlang’s battle-tested virtual machine).

In a world that changes rapidly, Elixir is a hidden gem that can be our safe harbor.

I am incredibly excited to announce our very first Greece |> Elixir meetup in Athens on Friday 16th of May, at the offices of Starttech Ventures. Please RSVP at Elixir.Greece.Athens.meetup/1.