[This article is the companion to my presentation for CodeBEAM America 2024, Elixir is the One-Person Stack for Building a Software Startup. You can download the slides as a PDF or view them in Google Slides.]

I’d like to share why I chose Elixir as the programming language (and really, as we’ll discuss, the full stack) for SleepEasy. I’m going to do my best to focus on the objective features of the language which make it particularly suitable for a small, nimble team starting a software business.

Because SleepEasy is B2B software, a web app is absolutely required. At some point in the distant future, a mobile app may be too, but I expect to get by without mobile for a long time. Even if I do one day need a mobile app, a simple wrapper around a web view will probably suffice.

The fact that I’m bootstrapping this company (that is, self-funding to start and growing it solely from the business’s own profits) sets one other major requirement: the app needs to be able to be built and maintained by a team of one, at least for the first few years or the first $10k+ in monthly revenue.

Continue reading…

As of today, SleepEasy is serving early access customers on the Basic and Startup plans. During early access, SleepEasy will monitor your site and notify you of issues by whatever means you choose.

Continue reading…

In the spirit of Halloween, I’d like to tell you a scary story. This one, though, is all the more scary because it’s true.

---

It was a dark and stormy night, and two software developers were working late to ship a new internal service for their team. The finishing touch was to add production tokens for Google OAuth so their peers could sign in without manually creating an account.

They slowly opened the GCP console, the web page loading so slowly you could almost hear it creeeeeeak across the wire.

“This storm must be messing with the wifi,” said the senior dev. “Weird.”

Continue reading…