I think you have a couple of choices. Either pitch it as a personal interest, some fun thing you’d like to share, see if you can provoke some curiosity from your co-workers, plant the seed, create your allies etc.

Or, go after a known and widely recognised problem within your organisation that Elixir is uniquely capable of solving, or at least can solve significantly better than the existing tech stack in at least a couple of dimensions.

Fwiw, I’d take the first option and play the long game, at least publicly. Maybe skunkworks something on the side if you can find someone else who’s interested enough.

(As an aside, I once gave a lunchtime ‘brown-bag’ on Erlang - Elixir didn’t exist then - within Microsoft to a bunch of battle hardened MSFT veterans, fun times)

Edit: the reality is all medium to large companies have software systems that are critical to them and practically all of them are not written in Elixir. They are written in boring but effective ecosystems likes Java or .Net. Moving this needle is very hard as a single developer.

I’d take a look at The Soul of Erlang and Elixir and figure out which parts would make the biggest impact based on the shorter timeframe.

My repeated experience is that people can’t be persuaded to switch tech stacks, no matter how good the argument. It’s like a religion. People aren’t going to budge from what they know.

The best ways are to start something new, or join an existing elixir project. Joining an existing project might not be possible depending on where you live/work. You could start something new in the same company if you have enough influence to start an autonomous project, but you’ll be making people worry about the bus factor in that case.

I would also first take the time to understand what they value at your company. This is important because you may be selling an aspect of Elixir that they don’t care about.

For example, with our startup, we do not need a high availability system. A few minutes of downtime per day is not a big deal.

What drew us to Elixir was how it excels at taming complexity, maintainable data processing pipelines, and the tooling around it such as Livebook.

If you understand why they chose the current tech stack, you might understand what the technical leadership values at the company.

Then you can tailor the presentation to highlight those points.

Too tired and busy to do my usual (from years ago) advocacy but one central point that really should be driven home one way or another is that Elixir is perfect for long-running servers where reliability is the absolute primary priority.