Elixir has rapidly developed into a mature language with an ever-growing library of packages that excels at running web apps. And because both Elixir and Phoenix were developed by Ruby / Rails programmers, the ease with which you can learn Elixir as a Ruby developer, is much greater than many other languages. With numerous code examples, this talk will discuss how learning a functional approach to handling web requests can improve what we do every day with Rails. This talk is aimed at people who have some familiarity with Rails but no experience with Elixir is necessary.