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Bryan hunt is on the Programme Committee for Code BEAM STO and has been involved with the open source community in various ways for the last 20 years. He is now leading Erlang Solutions' Riak support whilst being an advocate for Elixir and Erlang. In this article, Bryan gives his own personal list of talks he plans on attending at Code BEAM STO this year.

There is currently a lot of interest in how these problems are solved in the BEAM environment (using Actor model) and how some common patterns like Supervisor or GenServer are used in other languages or frameworks, Akka for example.

Elixir, Erlang and LFE certainly have different features but they all share a foundation that carries the same ideas, techniques and patterns. Having familiarity with each technology is a major strength: it allows you to tap into a wider ecosystem and get the best out of every technology. Even if you end up using only one language in your day to day development, that knowledge will be useful in giving you more tools to reason with and to solve problems efficiently.

Your manager may not immediately recognise the benefits of you attending Code BEAM STO, for both yourself and the business as a whole. There are over 40 talks this year, covering a broad mix of subjects and championing many new tools, techniques and time-saving implementations, revealed at Code BEAM STO first. There is no other conference that brings such a range of talks together.

Slides for the Gianluca Padovani's talk "From a web application to a distributed system" - Code BEAM Lite Milan 2018

Using Erlang’s process-centric approach enabled Sam and his team to quickly design and implement the Arweave network. A component of their approach was to build an extensive testing framework utilising Erlang’s message passing and lightweight threading model, simulating networks under realistic conditions on a vast scale.

I personally like Erlang because of the short implementation times, I love how easy it is to make concurrent distributed systems and implement communication protocols. It is less verbose than other languages and so less prone to errors. With its stable API, it is also low maintenance and used to resolve challenging problems. The fact that it is in high demand and you often get to work remotely, are a bonus too.

Companies choose Erlang and Elixir, because of the ease with which fault-tolerant and scalable programs deployable in a distributed network can be written. Erlang and Elixir are both functional languages that can use an Actor system to simplify the handling of concurrency and make error recovery possible. They are able to take full advantage of multicore computing, allowing more to be done with less. We are also now seeing a wider adoption of Elixir in production, especially for those companies more used to the syntax of Ruby.

Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding will be teaching Basic Erlang, Basic OTP and Applied Erlang Techniques at Code BEAM SF in San Francisco, between 12-14 March and 19-21 March.

The BEAM is the standard Erlang implementation in use today. It was specially designed just to run Erlang. But what is the BEAM other than a virtual machine for running Erlang?