In 2022, I started my programming journey, preparing for courses to get into school. focusing on traditional object-oriented programming. By 2023 I was accepted into a two-year Fullstack Open Source Web Developer program. Finding an internship was tough with over a 100 applications, rejection after rejection. Then I stumbled across Qsimbo, a startup that immediately felt like the right fit with comapny culture and colleugues. But they used Elixir, a functional programming language completely different from the OOP structures I was trained in. Adoption wasn’t easy, shifting from objects and mutable state to immutable data and pattern matching was like re-learning how to think about code. But as I embraced Elixir’s simplicity, scalability, and concurrency model, I found joy in solving problems differently. Now, with my internship and final exam wrapping up, I can confidently say that learning Elixir changed the way I think, code, and collaborate. It’s not just a language, it’s a new perspective, a different way to build and create. I’m grateful to be part of this thriving Elixir community, and I can’t wait to continue growing in this space.