Hi @Maartz! Thanks for your questions, my dog is in fact amazing 
I got into Elixir not too long after I graduated Flatiron School’s bootcamp where I learned mainly Ruby and JS. At first, learning Elixir was a hobby for me–I had a friend and co-worker who was really excited about it, and he really evangelized the language. I liked the pattern matching and the pipe operator and thought that I could write clean code that does cool things, but I wasn’t really in a position to appreciate the concurrency or fault-tolerance features bc I wasn’t using it professionally on a large enough scale. It stayed a hobby for me for a few years–I built a Phoenix chat application using Phoenix channels as a side project and that’s when I got really excited about the power of Phoenix, WebSocket and PubSub to power interactive UIs. Not too long after that, I got a new job where I could write Elixir professionally and that’s where I really saw a lot more of the benefits of Elixir, especially how it let teams and individuals be so productive. I actually wrote this blog post recently about some of those experiences An Elixir Adoption Success Story.
As for what bootcamps teach today, I’m not an expert on that subject but from a personal standpoint, I’d love to see functional languages taught more as a “first language”. I’m really interested to see how people without the baggage of object oriented thinking approach designing functional programs. And, I do really believe that LiveView is the future of a lot of web development, and seeing more beginners get into Elixir and Phoenix LiveView programming is a big goal of mine.