Last month I have been in London to attend the annual Erlang Factory conference. I haven’t had any time to write something about it, too much things to study while I was trying to getting ready for a lot of exams between the end of June and the first half of July. But at the end of the day my exams has been great and I don’t want to waste time any more, so… Let’s go

What is Erlang?

If you are reading this blog, probably you already know the answer to this question. But this blog entry comes from my Italian blog, and in Italy this explanation is very welcome.

At first sight, we could say that Erlang is a functional programming language born during the 80s in the Ericsson research Labs, it is great for build real-time, fault tolerant and concurrent systems. But ehy… Erlang is much better than this. It is not only a language, but it also has got a great runtime system which is able to reach linear scalability on multi-core systems (and this should be enough to make you understand about the bright future of this language), but there is something more.

Writing software in Erlang is not enough to reach fault tolerance or huge concurrency. Erlang is not a silver bullet and is for this reason that there is OTP (Open Telecom Platform), a framework more and more tied to Erlang (we usually say Erlang/OTP for this reason). OTP is a great topic but to sum up its benefits, I can say that it gives you the guidelines to reach in a simple way things that are very difficult to obtain with other languages… Concurrency (the real one), fault tolerance and quickness. If you are interested in Erlang, take a look at here.

What is the Erlang Factory?

Erlang Factory is the most important worldwide Erlang Event. It is organized by Erlang Solutions Ltd and there are 2 Erlang Factory events per year. One in San Francisco and the other one in London. Usually San Francisco is on March, while London is on the end of the spring in the first weeks of June. It is an unbelievable opportunity to meet giant names of the Erlang community, such as Joe Armstrong, Mike Williams (with I have had the pleasure to have lunch on the first day of the conference), Robert Virding, Francesco Cesarini and lots of other bright guys with whom is a pleasure to stop and talk about experiences with Erlang .

Only at the Erlang Factory you are able to dive into this environment which is getting more and more electrifying. Young Erlangers like me could understand how Erlang is used in the industrial ecosystem; it is very useful because after that you are able to make and idea on future working opportunities. On the other side, companies are able to promote their-self, telling success stories, which could be useful for other companies, reaching a knowledge reuse which is very, very useful.

About big companies I can mention Klarna, which today employs about 500 persons, and in 3 years of Erlang has only got 30 seconds of downtime on its systems, a gorgeous reliability. How can I write this post without write about Basho, the company behind the Riak Database, it is having a huge growth after some difficulties during the start-up period, and this great success story has been brought to us directly by Anthony Falco. I could go on with other companies, such as AOL, Trifork, Wooga (which builds video-games back-ends which have to deal with millions of active users every days), Demonware (one of the biggest service providers for on-line video-games… If you want a title, I can say… “Call of Duty Black Ops“), and lots of other… But the post will become unmanageable, so take a look at the speakers official page, you will be able to find slides and videos (which will be loaded step by step on this Vimeo’s channel).

Anyway, not only big IT firms at the Conference but even Start-Ups which starts with the right foot, writing their systems in Erlang. For example the Start-Up which is disrupting the way of betting in UK, that is Smarklets founded by the omnipresent Hunter Morris with Jason Trost.

So, Erlang Factory is from StartUps to Big Firms but there are also enough space for Universities, especially for Uppsala University, from which comes great news such as the PropEr project, introduced by Kostis Sagonas. But there also was space for the University of Kent, and for Simon Thompson (co-author with Francesco Cesarini of the Erlang Programming book) who has introduced us to the latest progress done with the Wrangler project, an Erlang re-factoring tool.

At the end there have been some announcements on the future of Erlang, such as some previews on the future features of the next releases, and about this topic I want to say a big thank you to the Development Team. They are doing a great job.

The C-Factor is unbelievable, and for C-Factor I mean the community factor. At the end of every Conference day there is a real third half, and between some beer mugs there is the opportunity to meet each other and do some networking.

The pictures below, for example, depicts some moments after the second day of the Conference, while we were enjoying a beer kindly offered by Erlang Solutions in front of the Old Sessions House (the conference venue). In the first picture, half of the  ”Team Italy” or rather me, Roberto Aloi (author of these gorgeous pics) and Carlo Bertoldi (which I have to give thanks for the two pics below) together with Kostis Sagonas while in the second one its me with Bjarne Daker.

If you have questions, maybe not only about the Conference, but on Erlang too don’t hesitate to contact me on Twitter.