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Erlang Solutions Newsletter 16th June 2011 |
Contents
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Erlang Camp and University - Boston, USA 9 - 13 AugustTogether with the ErlangCamp, Erlang Solutions is offering three courses in a variety of Erlang specializations, giving attendees the opportunity to learn Erlang and expand on their existing knowledge of the language before the camp begins. The courses offer an in depth, hands-on approach to learning. With a maximum of 12 people per course there is the opportunity to go into much more detail and receive direct feedback and help on exercises from the trainers. Courses available are Erlang Express, OTP Express and XMPP with Erlang and ejabberd. With this training before the camp, you will be able to hit the ground running and show of your new found skills at the Erlang Camp.
ErlangCamp is about writing real-world production software in Erlang/OTP. ErlangCamp is hosted by a group of experienced Erlang/OTP experts that have put massive amounts of Erlang/OTP code into production over many years. They will teach you the techniques, tools and even the pitfalls of dealing with Erlang/OTP in the real world. When you leave you will be an Erlang/OTP expert!
Don't delay, register today!
Erlang Factory London - A Review
This year's Erlang Factory London was a great success, with 150 delegates attending from over 18 countries! It was an opportunity for delegates to meet the original Erlang Team as, Mike Williams, Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding and Bjarne Dacker we’re all in attendance. The keynotes came from, Mike Williams, one of the inventors of Erlang and Kostis Sagonas, Leader of the HiPE team and Erlang tool developer at Uppsala University and the National Technical University of Athens. Day one saw Mike give an interesting talk on "Why Erlang was invented and a few things you don't want to tell your manager about Erlang." which included, the ease in which you can learn Erlang and that you won't need so many programmers (something you definitely don't want to tell your boss). Kostis and his "PropEr Talk", which looked at PropEr, an open-source tool for property-based testing in Erlang, opened day two of the conference. Delegates who couldn’t wait to purchase the PropEr shirt and tie combination met this with great interest and discussion. This year we also introduced a business track, which among other things, featured a very entertaining talk by Basho COO Tony Falco. He recounted the challenges of their early days, seeking venture capital for Erlang-based technology. Today's Erlang startups are all better off because of the successes of Riak, CouchDB, RabbitMQ et al. Twitter was in full flow during the conference, with tweets including: @etrepum: #erlangfactory London was the best conference I've been to in years. So many great talks, I'll have to catch the ones I missed online! @pavlobaron: Seriously, when I don't go to London for the next #erlangfactory, I will eat my own socks. Without salt & pepper. @hungryblank: meck by @eproxus is a sweet erlang mocking library http://eproxus.github.com/meck/ #erlangfactory Delegates got the chance to see some of the top names in Erlang and find out how companies such as AOL, Heroku, Basho and Ericsson are using Erlang!
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Erlang News
Spawnfest Spawnfest is an annual 48 hour development competition in which teams of skilled application developers get exactly one weekend to develop the best Erlang applications that they can. First contest is scheduled for July 9th and 10th. Twenty teams have registered so far, hurry and register now on spawnfest.com. The competition will be judged by a panel consisting of Erlang Solutions' Ulf Wiger, Robert Virding, MociMedia's Bob Ippolito and Basho's very own Justin Sheehy.
GOTO Prague takes place in Prague, Czech Republic and includes: 2 conference days, 1 tutorial day and more than 20 presentation sessions by international experts and authors. Robert Virding, Erlang Solutions Principal Language Expert, will be giving two half-day training courses and two presentations during the conference. GOTO conferences are vendor-independent and made for developers, by developers, presenting the industry's best speakers. Our goal is to give the software development community a high-quality conference with unique learning, discussion and networking opportunities. In a recent article released in The Economist, Erlang is recognised as one of “the” functional languages and is very well suited to parallel programming. “Serious efforts are being made to make parallel programming easier and more approachable”. Erlang has long since moved out of the academic realm and is now used by many companies. Facebook uses Erlang to power its chat capabilities, as just one example. The Architecture of Open Source Applications, a book that authors of twenty-five open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why, features a chapter on how Riak uses OTP, co-authored by Francesco Cesarini, Justin Sheehy and Andy Gross. All proceeds go to Amnesty International. In its first two weeks, it has sold over 1000 copies raising over $5000. You can purchase your copy of the book here. GOTO Copenhagen 2011 was a banner event for Erlang, with one talk by Ulf Wiger, two talks by Francesco Cesarini and an Erlang-related keynote by Kresten Krab Thorup. In addition, Ulf Wiger led an Erlang programming kata in the Programming with the Stars track. The kata was mentioned in a Danish blog article, and it is perhaps worth noting while all sessions chose to solve the same problem - scoring for a tennis game - Erlang, Ruby and Clojure all finished on time, while Java and C# did not. The audience for the Erlang kata had no prior Erlang experience, but were allowed to lead the design. There was room for a number of refactorings, improvements and little anecdotes, while still finishing on time, and those who stayed during the break were treated to a tennis simulation demonstrating the power of Erlang state machines. Francesco gave a fun and instructive talk about the realities of growing a startup. The "Erlang from the Trenches" talk described the evolution and rationale of Erlang through stories and anecdotes from his time at the Computer Science lab. Kresten keynote stole the show, however, carefully outlining how the software world is facing a new paradigm shift, and how Erlang holds many of the answers that will get us through it. "If Erlang doesn't become the next great language, it will at least receive honourable mention" and when "The [multi-core] revolution comes, you will be better prepared if you know Erlang" were two of our favourite quotes.
Trifork A/S to acquire stake in Erlang Solutions Limited
Trifork A/S, the Danish software consulting and conferencing company and Erlang Solutions Limited, the driver behind the worldwide uptake of the Erlang development environment, on Friday 10 June announced that Trifork will invest in Erlang Solutions. Erlang Solutions will continue to trade independently of Trifork A/S, but the investment will enable both companies to leverage their combined capabilities in key industry sectors and to benefit from the synergies in their consultancy, product, training and conference offerings. Moving forward, both companies will collaborate to create a unique portfolio that addresses the growing demand for industrial-strength open source solutions. For more information please see the Press Release
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