A relative newcomer to networking in Erlang, Dr. Ajay Kumar, has started a self-educational project to create a web server from scratch in Erlang to give himself some first-hand insight into how TCP sockets work in Erlang and how web servers work in general. Web servers are a thing almost everyone has written against or for, but few have tried to implement on their own because socket programming sounds scary and time consuming to learn.
This video is quite short but incidentally demonstrates how not scary socket programming is and how easy it is to experiment with networking concepts on your own. Go experiment! Write networky things! It’s fun!
As an aside to this… I have a two-part explanation video that explains everything that is going on inside the service at he is basing his web server on. In the first part I explain what is going on within the default chat server that ZX templates as a network service project (kind of slow, covers basics for Erlang and ZX newcomers), and in the second part I explain how I used that as a basis for creating a telnet chat service that implements global shouts, channels, permissions, and other basic features needed for a real chat service (a bit better paced if you already know your way around Erlang and discusses some higher-level concepts such as service structure and the “service -> worker pattern“).