Node with its sweet-spot of quickly standing up back-ends has caught fire in dev shops around the world. Depending on your business case, that fire can yield a high-fiving “we did it!” celebration, or a charred project timeline with scorched, haggard developers. When is Node OK? When is it dangerous? What’s the alternative? Many seasoned Node developers are discovering Elixir makes a great lifeline when Node turns creepy. They're escaping to a polyglot approach: JavaScript in the browser, Elixir on the server. OK… but why Elixir? Answer: Elixir is approachable and productive like Node, but it’s much more versatile and safe than Node. Elixir is an expressive functional programming language that is 100% "good parts” borrowed from Erlang, Ruby, Clojure, Python, F#, and Node.js. Elixir delivers familiar (modern) tooling, developer joy, simplified distribution, massive concurrency, and carrier grade fault-tolerance. Curious? Good! Come join the fun!