Erlang: Getting Started Without Melting

There are two things that might be meant when someone references “Erlang”: the language, and the environment (the EVM/BEAM and OTP). The first one, the language part, is actually super simple and quick to learn. The much larger, deeper part is learning what the BEAM does and how OTP makes your programs better. It is […]

Your tests don’t tell you what you think they do

Yesterday I wrote a tiny JSON encoder/decoder in Erlang. While the Erlang community wasn’t in dire need of yet another JSON parser, the ones I saw around do things just a tiny bit differently than I want them to and writing a module against RFC-8259 isn’t particularly hard or time consuming. Someone commented on (gasp!) […]

James Mickens: Life as a Developer

Below is a somewhat whimsical talk given by James Mickens last year titled Life as a Developer: My Code Does Not Work Because I am a Victim of Complex Societal Factors That are Beyond My Control. (If you recall, Mickens is the guy who did the insane/awesome Monitorama talk about the cloud a few years […]