The Erlang Exchange

over 3 years ago | Karthik: Chain of Thoughts

Thanks to Dennis Byrne, I got the opportunity to attend and present at The Erlang Exchange in London, on the 26th and 27th June.
I thoroughly enjoyed those two days at the conference - lots of interesting sessions, lots of erlang gurus and a lot of technology enthusiasts.
I got to speak to a so many new people in those couple of days and had lots of interesting conversations.
Here is my account of the event as I saw it.

The Erlang Exchange 2008 - a report

over 3 years ago | Karthik Ramachandra : Concrete Abstractions

The Erlang exchange was the first international conference on erlang aimed at all erlang enthusiasts, from architects to newbies. It was also targeted at businesses, who got more visibility about erlang and its community.(about 30% of the participants were from the financial sector)

About 150 people participated in the two day conference which was held at the Old Sessions House, London. There were more than 30 speakers from various backgrounds, who came to share their experiences. People got to interact with the likes of Joe Armstrong, Klacke Wikström, Steve Vinoski, in an informal environment.

Day 1 : 26th June 2008

The Keynote was delivered by Joe Armstrong, who spoke about erlang, its potential and practicality and gave a kind of an introductory context to the conference as a whole.
This was followed by talks in two tracks, the tools and gadgets track, which included topics like Erlang DTrace, Erlang and Robotics; and the startup track, with talks on Erlang/OTP vs. Google App engine etc. Find the full schedule here.
The programme was planned so that people got to socialize with each other during coffee/tea /lunch breaks and there were always lots of interesting discussions happening.


The post lunch tracks were about web applications and financial applications in erlang. There were also talks about erlang build and packaging systems(erlware), and Wrangler ( the erlang refactoring tool).

After 6 PM, there was an informal set of sessions by the representatives of various UserGroups in London, about their communities and activities. Representatives from LRug(Ruby), Haskell User Group, Groovy User Group and a couple of other groups were present. This continued on to the Erlang Exchange party.



It was a very fulfilling day, a fun day, and a tiring one too, since there were loads of new concepts and ideas floating around all through the day.


Day 2 : 27th June 2008

Day two started with the keynote by Steve Vinoski who spoke about Enterprise integration. He traced the evolution of the enterprise industry and approaches to enterprise integration, while pointing out interesting observations on how technologies can end up creating more problems than solving it if "developer convenience" is prioritised over "correctness" of the solution.
This was followed by an interesting talk by Klacke Wikström, about erlang and tail-f systems.
After this, there were three parallel tracks for the rest of the day, with a few tutorial sessions.

The Enterprise Integration track included talks about RabbitMQ, EJabberD, JInterface, CouchDB, etc.

There was also a very interesting session by Alexander Reinefeld on "Building a transactional distributed data store with Erlang". Refer to the paper here. They have some amazing results on experiments conducted by hosting the entire Wikipedia on a p2p infrastructure, completely built with erlang which scales better with fractional hardware! Very very interesting!


The Testing Track had talks about eunit for unit testing, using erlang for Performance testing of web applications, tutorials on QuickCheck and Tsung. The other tutorials were about buiding web applications in erlang, using Faxien and Sinan, and about robotics.

The conference concluded with a panel discussion on Erlang enterprise integration. Most people agreed with Joe's opinion that erlang needs a killer app to prove to the enterprise before it can be widely accepted. And the lack of libraries for lots of small things was also another reason which would put people off erlang.

One thing that everyone in the room was convinced about was that erlang is going to definitely grow big in the coming future. And the erlang community, though quite small as of now, is quite mature and pragmatic in saying "The right tool for the right Job" - Using erlang gives tremendous results, only when used for the right things. And this pragmatism, I feel, is a very positive way to look at solving the problems in front of us.

Overall, it was a very successful event, thanks to the organizers (skillsmatter and erlang training and consulting) , sponsors, speakers and participants. The whole event has been videotaped and hopefully would be available soon.

Separation of concerns

over 3 years ago | Karthik: Chain of Thoughts

{ :tech_stuff => Concrete Abstractions, :others => Chain of Thoughts}

I don't want to mix the two people in me... So let there be two blogs, one for each of myself.