Nick Gerakines

I’m currently at the Erlang User Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. Jacob and I arrived pretty late last night from a long 28 hour day, but I’m really excited to be here. Stockholm is a beautiful city and I can’t wait to get out there and see some of the sights. There are some really great presentations today and a lot of faces that look familiar.

Rusty Klaphous gave a great presentation on Nitrogen and Riak. I’ve been skeptical of Nitrogen for a while but seeing it in action was great. His presentation was pretty meta because it was through slideblast.com which was made with Nitrogen/Riak and the presentation went through the source code for it.

Jacob Vorreuter was next with a presentation on Erlang parse transforms and the internals of Erlang forms and compile-time syntax. Jake has a bunch of stuff on GitHub that uses and compliments his presentation too.

Jared Flatow and Ville Tuulos gave a really good presentation on Disco and the newer project, Discodex. The discodb data storage format that they are using for immutable data storage and indexing looks awesome. The idea of immutable data storage at first seems scary but makes a lot of sense in some cases. I don’t think the idea really lends itself to web services as we think of them, but it is a really powerful concept.

Ulf Wiger talked about Erlang and the cloud. Acknowledging that he’s part of the “old guard”, he gave a really interesting perspective on telecommunications use and what the cloud really is.

Rickard Cardell gave an interesting talk on using different backends with mnesiaex, one of which was the erlang_couchdb module that I wrote.

Later in the afternoon, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon talked about Git, GitHub and BERT. The idea behind BERT, BERP and ERNIE is pretty slick and although the entire concept is based on Erlang terms and data types, they don’t actually use an Erlang client or API. Regardless, the talk was pretty good and got an interesting conversation going afterwards.

At the end of the day, Kenneth Lundin gave an Erlang/OTP update which had some great bits of information. A very interesting update is the inclusion of NIFs. The idea of being able to extend an Erlang module with c is a long overdue feature. What struck my interest the most is that the Ericsson team will be exposing the Erlang source tree through GIT, likely on GitHub.

We stayed until 10:30pm or so and finally left after some great presentations and a lot of really good conversation. I’m planning on skipping the tutorials and hackathon tomorrow in favor of going out into the city and wandering around. We were about a dozen times to go see the Vasa museum and the royal palace.