Elixir Contributor Summit 2025: Shaping the Future Together at Software Mansion

On May 17th 2025, something special happened for the Elixir community. Right after ElixirConf EU, we opened the doors of our Kraków office to host the very first Elixir Contributor Summit. The idea came from our CEO, Marcin, who’d seen how valuable similar gatherings were in the React Native world, and figured, why not try it in Elixir? So, after some great conversations with José Valim and a bit of planning on both sides, we made it happen.

The summit brought together over 40 Elixir contributors from all over the world — people who care deeply about the language and want to help it move forward. It wasn’t about big speeches or formalities. The goal was simple: to address critical challenges and opportunities facing the language, bring the community closer together, and increase Elixir adoption.

As the host, I wanted to keep the event format relaxed but focused. That’s why we created a space where ideas could flow freely, and contributors could come up with clear action points. We kicked things off with open chats to share what’s been going on across the community. Then we moved on to quick pitch sessions, where contributors could raise pressing topics they felt were important. From there, we split into smaller groups to dive into the key issues and work out some concrete next steps. Curious about the takeaways? Let’s jump into a quick recap of the Elixir Contributor Summit 2025.

Where Elixir could go next

During the open chat sessions, contributors pinpointed four key areas that offer exciting opportunities for Elixir to grow and innovate:

AI integration & tooling

The connection between Elixir and AI came up again and again with conversations covering everything from improving software reliability, through structural verification when working with AI systems, to setting ecosystem-wide standards for packages to better interact with developer-focused large language models (LLMs).

Many people also saw a strong potential in Elixir’s abstractions (like supervisors and agents) for building AI-powered systems. There was also a lot of interest in creating evaluation frameworks to help showcase what Elixir can do in AI contexts, including the idea of a centralized repository for Elixir evaluations and training data to boost the language’s visibility in the LLM space.

Education & community building

Another key step toward the ecosystem’s growth is to make Elixir more accessible for newcomers, so they can easily get started. One of the main ideas was to reach people where they’re most open to discovering new tools — whether that’s at meetups, guest lectures, workshops, or in entrepreneurial spaces.

Summit participants also stressed the need for building clear learning paths that would guide developers from entry-level to advanced Elixir topics, along with a single, easy-to-navigate place for resources that address both technical and business questions. The action point here? The community wants to develop shared educational tools like Livebook examples and games to make learning Elixir more fun and engaging.

Cross-platform support

Expanding Elixir’s reach to more platforms was another clear priority. A big part of the discussion focused on improving the experience for Windows users — for example, by providing precompiled native dependencies and sharing better CI setups with cross-platform checks.

The group also talked about adding platform support labels in Hex and possibly building dashboards to track library compatibility across different environments.

Enterprise outreach

One of the contributor groups focused on strategies to showcase Elixir’s real-world success, especially in production environments. The community agreed there’s a need to gather and showcase testimonials from major BEAM users, making such success stories easy to find through well-designed websites and targeted outreach to decision-makers.

The next steps that came up in our discussions were all about showing what makes Elixir special: how it handles complex problems with simple, seamless solutions, and how the ecosystem gives teams — both startups and established companies — everything they need to build outstanding products.

Software Mansion’s role in shaping the community’s future

Hosting this summit shows we’re committed to supporting and growing the Elixir ecosystem. As creators of several key open source libraries, the Software Mansion team has been actively involved in expanding Elixir’s reach.

Our flagship projects like Membrane (a multimedia framework for Elixir), LiveDebugger (a tool that improves the developer experience), and Popcorn (a library that makes it possible to run Elixir inside web browsers using WebAssembly) showcase our technical leadership in the community. We’re happy to see that our new library, Popcorn, directly tackles some of the cross-platform challenges discussed at the summit and opens up new opportunities for Elixir adoption.

Bringing together so many different voices and sparking real, meaningful conversations is exactly how we’ve always pushed Elixir forward; not just by writing code, but by growing a strong, connected community. As the ideas discussed during the Elixir Contributor Summit take shape in the coming months, we’ll be there, lending our expertise, sharing resources, and helping turn visions and plans into reality.

The energy and teamwork we felt at the summit really reminded us what makes the Elixir community so unique: a shared passion for building better software and a genuine willingness to work together toward common goals. And that spirit of collaboration is exactly what will keep pushing us forward. 😉

We’re Software Mansion: multimedia experts, AI explorers, React Native core contributors, community builders, and software development consultants.