Erlang Factory

Erlang-Factory is over and it was great. I’m so happy to see the many project and community leaders coming together to introduce their projects and get involved with each other’s work. There were 6 tracks throughout the 2 day conference that included “Erlang Case Studies”, “Test-Driven Development”, “Enterprise Integration”, “Cool Applications and Features”, “Give me a break from Erlang” and “Erlang and the Web”. My own presentation about test driven development in Erlang went quite well — I’ll post a link to the video once it’s up.

On day one keynotes by Robert Virding and Ezra Zygmuntowicz opened up the conference with the idea that there isn’t a one true way to work on your projects with Erlang. Robert’s talk on the why and how Erlang was designed the way it was, was really interesting. Ezra’s talk about blending Ruby and Erlang gave some insight as to how Erlang can play very nicely with and compliment web languages like Ruby.

On day one, I went to these talks:

  • EUnit How to: Tips, Tricks and News by Richard Carlsson
  • Integrating OS package management and Erlang by Paul Mineiro
  • Mixing Erlang and Ruby with Erlectricity by Tom Preston-Werner
  • Test-Driven Development with Erlang by myself

Day one ended with the Birds of a Feather Sessions followed by an Erlounge at the Palo Alto Gordon Biersch but I couldn’t attend.

The day two keynotes where by Damien Katz and Ulf Wiger, both were really really good. Damien’s talk shifted and instead of talking about the technical traits of couchdb, he gave a telling and personal story about what its like to put it all on the line to do something you enjoy. His presentation was different because it told the story about how things were kind of crappy before he became “that guy working on the stuff he enjoyed.” It was inspirational.

On day two, I went to these talks:

  • CouchDB from 10,000 feet – An introduction to CouchDB by Jan Lehnardt
  • CouchDB Apps by Chris Anderson
  • Everything you wanted to know about Dynomite but was affraid to ask by Cliff Moon
  • CouchDB Case Studies by Tim Dysinger and Nitin Borwankar

The closing session for day two was really about reaching out to the users, enthusiasts and developers out in the wild to see what they were interested in and wanted. Things like unified package management and better documentation came up.

All of the material from my presentation can be found in my erlang-factory repository on GitHub.