🚀 The Solo Developer's Choice: Why I Migrated My Backend from Go to Elixir/Phoenix

As a solo developer, my biggest challenge isn't coding—it's efficiency. Every hour I spend fighting tooling or boilerplate is an hour I’m not spending on features.

Let me be clear: I embrace Go (Golang). It is an outstanding language for raw performance, systems programming, and concurrent processing.

😩 The Go Conundrum: Too Much Boilerplate, Not Enough Structure
I absolutely respect and utilize Go for performance-critical systems. It’s a phenomenal language. However, when I was building my full application, I kept running into two major roadblocks that crushed my solo velocity:

1. The Code Organization Headache This was my biggest source of friction. In a large Go application, there’s no official, standard framework to guide structure. I spent countless hours trying to define the “best” way to organize my code, shuffling directories, and debating architecture patterns.

The result? A codebase that, while technically correct, felt arbitrary and lacked immediate clarity. Onboarding even myself after a few weeks felt like a small mental burden.

1. Reinventing the Wheel For common web development tasks—like routing, authentication, and database connectivity—I was forced to write a significant amount of boilerplate code.

I needed the productivity of something like Django or Rails, but those frameworks felt too heavy, and their performance overhead was simply too high for my low-latency goals. I felt stuck between speed and developer experience.

✨ The Elixir/Phoenix Revelation: The Perfect Balance
I needed a language that offered the performance of Go but with the structure and productivity of a mature framework. Elixir, powered by the Phoenix Framework, was the answer.

1. Instant Structure and Opinionated Design
   Phoenix is a breath of fresh air. It provides an opinionated, high-quality structure right out of the box, immediately solving my organization problem. I stopped spending time thinking about where to put the code and started focusing on what the code needed to do.

2. The Shockingly Short Learning Curve
   I fully expected a complex transition to a functional programming language. To my surprise, the fundamentals of Elixir took me only about two days to grasp. The language is clean, readable, and incredibly approachable.

After that initial steep climb, I was immediately productive, writing features in Phoenix and leveraging tools like Ecto (the Elixir data mapper) that provide robust, structured data handling with minimal fuss.

1. Self-Documenting Code as a Side Effect This was an unexpected win for maintainability. The expressive, functional style of Elixir—where functions clearly define inputs and outputs—naturally leads to code that is self-documenting. For a solo developer, this reduces the cognitive load of navigating and maintaining a large codebase dramatically.

The Bottom Line: Exponential Velocity
The shift wasn't a lateral move; it was an exponential gain in efficiency. My development velocity quadrupled because Elixir and Phoenix removed the constant organizational battles and boilerplate writing that plagued my Go setup. I'm now writing features faster than ever, and my new codebase is a joy to work with.

If you are a solo developer constantly weighing the cost of developer speed against application performance, do yourself a favor: look at the power and structure of Elixir and Phoenix.

💬 What’s Your Take?
Have you ever migrated stacks purely for productivity reasons? What's the biggest speed bump in your current backend setup?