Brex Engineering
medium.com/brexeng · Company blog · on HN since 2018
Brex's engineering blog on backend choices, APIs, rewards software, and GPT-4 prompting.
What HN saysCommenters mostly cite the post on Brex leaving Elixir for Kotlin, noting reasons like the time spent maintaining internal libraries.
17HN people shared it
6linked it in comments
15stories submitted
103story points
3 years agolast shared
2018people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Brex is moving away from Elixir to Kotlin7 people · 31 points · first shared 2021 · 11 comments on HN
- 2Why Brex Chose Elixir (2018)2 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 3How we designed the software for the Brex rewards platform1 people · 37 points · first shared 2018 · 5 comments on HN
- 4Brex’s GPT-4 Prompt Engineering Guide1 people · 12 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 5Releasing Substation v1.01 people · 6 points · first shared 2024 · discussion on HN
- 6How to Sell SLOs to Engineering Directors1 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 7Build your own Ethereum in 200 lines of Python1 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 8Building the Brex Accounting API1 people · 2 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 9Building Brex Instant Payouts1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 10Women in Engineering at Brex1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 11Change Data Capture at Brex1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · 1 comments on HN
- 12Kubernetes Rolling Update and Termination Grace Periods at Brex1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13A Transaction’s Journey Through Brex1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
numair · 2021-10-22
I was wondering why Brex left Elixir, and what happened to all of the tooling they created to work in the language. From their blog[1]:
> Building and maintaining internal libraries to support Elixir as our primary backend language became time consuming, and few other users in the ecosystem seemed to share enough use cases to make OSS collaboration mutually beneficial.
The whole point of giving things, and contributing code, is to do it without the expectation of a return or that anyone will even use it. It’s the mystery and the surprise of the way in which others benefit that makes our entire ecosystem work. When companies ride on the volunteer labor of others to become worth billions, and then come up with all sorts of excuses for why they can’t give back... I guess the success of AWS demonstrates that nobody will care.
1: https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c841…
colesantiago · 2023-11-24
(2021)
Unfortunately Brex doesn't use Elixir anymore
https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c841…
WJW · 2023-09-21
Do you reject learning any language that has been migrated away from by any company? Why not make up your own mind about whether it is nice instead of depending on rumours about other companies?
In any case you could have easily googled "brex elixir" and have found their blog explaining their reasoning as the first result: https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c841…
29athrowaway · 2022-10-12
Elixir to Kotlin
https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c841…
Note that Brex founders are Brazilian and the Elixir author is Brazilian.
pratikel · 2021-10-21
Hey,
I'm the author of the post and we built the API on Kotlin and some of them are our earliest Kotlin services. We're using Micronaut OpenAPI to generate specs.
You're right in that it's hard to do many of these things in Elixir and it was a big factor in us moving away from Elixir. I wrote a bit about it here https://medium.com/brexeng/building-backend-services-with-kotlin-7c841…
anildigital · 2019-10-11
@runj__ You should read this blog post by Brex founder. He really says how Elixir suited well to the problem they were trying to solve https://medium.com/brexeng/why-brex-chose-elixir-fe1a4f313195