Andrew Thompson

Author of Lager and Gen_smtp, Rebar and Riak Contributor

Andrew has been doing Erlang since 2008, first in the VoIP world writing mod_erlang_event for FreeSWITCH, and using that to build an open-source call center platform called OpenACD. After that, Andrew was a Senior Engineer at Basho working on Riak and from there he moved to the IoT world at Helium. At Helium Andrew has built several Erlang powered platforms over the years culminating in building Helium's decentralized, distributed IoT network.

Past Activities

Andrew Thompson
Code BEAM Europe 2022

19 May 2022
16.25 - 17.10

Erlang for Untrusted Decentralized Systems

Erlang is commonly used for distributed systems on a trusted substrate (when all the nodes are run by a single party) but what about when multiple parties who don't necessarily trust each other want to work together? This talk will discuss some of the technologies Andrew has implemented at Helium to build distributed systems on an untrusted substrate at Helium including HoneyBadgerBFT, threshold cryptography, distributed key generation and peer to peer networking.

OBJECTIVES

Educate Erlang developers on the alternatives to traditional distributed systems development on the BEAM.

AUDIENCE

People interested in alternatives to distributed Erlang, decentralization, cutting edge cryptography or untrusted consensus systems.

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Andrew Thompson
Code BEAM SF 2019

01 Mar 2019
11.25 - 12.10

Erlang logging for the 21st OTP

In 2011, Andrew released lager and in 2012 he gave a talk at Erlang Factory SF explaining why he wrote it and comparing it to all the alternatives available at the time. A lot has changed since; most of the old competitors to lager have fallen out of usage, Elixir now exists and has its own logger and now, with OTP 21, Erlang finally has a new logger in the standard library. This talk will revisit the Erlang logging scene and compare all the modern alternatives.