Highlights of Code BEAM STO 2018

As the video's for Code Beam STO 2018 are released, I thought it would be a great time to share some of my thoughts on this year's conference.

This was my sixth year attending the conference (historically known as “Erlang User Conference”) and my second time pres

enting. As always, the conference was well organised and a pleasure to attend.

Among the many highlights for me, a few that stand out would be –

– Happy Birthday, Erlang – Erlang was open sourced 20 years ago. The afterparty was converted into a big Birthday event, with many of the original Erlang team present. For an Erlang devotee like myself, this was a very special occasion.

Of course, we had a few talks to celebrate this, and it’s always fun to look back in time, hear from people who were present 15-20 years ago how Erlang evolved and learn about some of those “historical reasons”. Here is to 20 more years with as much innovation and passion among the community.

– Rethinking Erlang distribution is still a hot topic: several talks contained some interesting ideas: using consul or etcd instead of relying on DNS and EPMD for node discovery or using IS-IS routing protocol to offer alternatives to fully-meshed topologies to scale to 1000 nodes cluster

– Those who are interested in compilers and AST also heard, among other things, micro-optimisation tricks when writing Erlang code or compiling Elm to BEAM (written purely in Haskell) or the introduction of a gradual typing (combination of static and dynamic) for Erlang.

For my part, I chose to present an exciting VM feature that has been greatly reworked in the freshly released Erlang/OTP 21.0. I recently found a need to dive deep into the world of Scalable Network IO and my presentation gives an introduction into the problem domain and recent improvements. I plan a more detailed post on Poll Sets in the near future. In the mean time, you can view a video of the talk below.

To end, I feel that after a bit of loss in interest in the Erlang User Conference, in the past years the organisers are succeeding in uniting the Erlang and Elixir communities (also being open to other languages implemented on the Erlang VM). The BEAM conference is now a gathering place for more advanced crowds while the Elixir conference is a good entry point for newcomers into the BEAM community. Finally, the hosting city, Stockholm in the summer is an awesome place to visit, even if Erlang wasn’t born there. As always, I'm counting down the days until next year’s event.