Building software is hard. (Open secret: Doing almost anything worthwhile is hard. Working at our day-job is hard. Raising kids is hard. Meaningful relationships are hard.) When working on hard things, we always hit The Dip. It just seems too hard to fight through the challenges to get to the finish line. Accountability is our secret weapon for conquering the Side-project Dip.

Like most creative people, we have plenty of ideas. Filtering quality ideas out of our idea torrent, however, is the hard part. We use a simple process to figure out which ideas are worth more attention. It isn't perfect, but neither are we, so it feels like a good fit.

'API-first' generally refers to making the API for an application a first-class citizen. To process purists, it also means designing and developing the API as the first step. As newer Elixir/Phoenix developers, we are iterating toward that ideal as we stumble along and learn how to build an API to support our native phone apps.

Getting that first job experience is the difficult part of breaking into tech. Most advice about getting experience falls into two categories: work with open source, and build more projects. Elixirized will offer a third option.

Getting hired is great. Looking for a job and enduring the interview process is not. Insider Secret: Almost everyone, including hiring managers, is bad at this. Here is your cheat code to have the best jobs come to you.

Outdated and incomplete content is not unique to tutorials; it's a ubiquitous problem that we may help solve some day. In the meantime, here are some crucial tips to making custom domains work with a Phoenix LiveView app hosted on Fly.io

Mindery, our first Elixirized product, helps people keep track of important events for which they want reminders. Our first use case is subscriptions, such as streaming subscriptions. Most people save money just by signing up for Mindery, because that process makes them remember (and cancel) a bunch of subscriptions they have forgotten about.

Junior developers are often stuck between the rock of no commercial experience and the hard place of expectations by hiring companies for exactly the experience they don't yet have. The Elixirized team is working to solve that.

Tutorial Hell is when yet another tutorial has outright errors and/or no longer works because the underlying language/framework has deprecated the functionality that once worked. You don't have to take that any more. Elixirized "DOtorials" are the solution.

Buying local. We've all heard that idea promoted during the past few years. This essay makes the counterintuitive case that in this era of Big Tech, Big Box stores and our domination by social media and Amazon,"buy local" may be our best hope for saving civilization.