
Duncan McGreggor
Lisper, Erlanger, and LFE core contributor
Duncan started hacking in the early 80s on copies of the BSD games, was a linguist in the 101st Airborne Division, studied physics and applied maths at university, traveled to India to practice meditation and dialectic with monks in exile, and eventually joined a startup just before the Internet crash in 1999/2000. Somehow, that did not deter his life-long passion for programming: he started hacking on small, distributed services in the early 2000s, eventually became a Fellow at the Python Software Foundation, joined Robert Virding as a contributor to LFE, and coded in another Lisp for the USGS (LANDSAT data) and then NASA. Duncan is currently a principal engineer at MediaMath, dedicated to building better engineering teams and software engineering practices while also teaching new generations of engineers a love for the art.
Upcoming Activities
Code BEAM V America
Sound on BEAM: Music in the Land of Distributed Lisp
While not built for sound or digital signal processing, Erlang excels in the realm where music control systems have converged: network message-passing. In this talk, Duncan will provide some brief background and share previous related sound-generation work on the BEAM, then cover a recent effort in Lisp Flavoured Erlang (LFE) to integrate with well-established improvisational tools and music recording systems. Full use of LFE/OTP behaviours and supervision trees will be covered, as well as application start phases for synchronizing system startup. In addition, LFE's strength as a platform for creating DSL's will be covered in the dual context of integrating with multiple systems and creating generative music.
Code BEAM V America
LFE with Robert Virding and Duncan McGreggor
TBA