Languages can’t succeed in a vacuum. In 1999, Dave Thomas wrote the Pickaxe book, a text that played a critical role in the adoption and growth of the Ruby programming language. In 2014, he was seeing some of the same signs in a young programming language called Elixir. In 2014, Bruce Tate and José Valim were coming to grips with the fact that Elixir needed a web server and realizing José’s Dynamo server was not going to succeed. Neither had any idea what it would take to climb the mountain in front of them. This climb is a process that all open source communities must go through. In this talk, Bruce will tell those stories and others as we explore the Elixir story, not from the perspective from the core team but as members of the supporting community.