Erlang Factory: A Retrospective

I recently presented on Reia at Erlang Factory in San Francisco. It was a lot of fun, both attending and presenting. Videos of my talk, and the many others I heard people raving about over IRC and Twitter are forthcoming but will hopefully be available soon. There are certainly many I intend to check out.

The conference certainly exceeded my expectations. I thought I might be something of an outsider in the community, but I was surprised to see a number of Ruby people in the community, which I found pretty interesting. Ezra's talk on Nanite touched on an important point: there's not a lot of crossover in what Ruby and Erlang do well, and for that reason they're relatively compilentary languages. I ended up pitching Reia as what I hoped to be a best-of-both-worlds solution.

There was certainly ample talk about CouchDB, which got me thinking about using Reia as a language for CouchDB views. CouchDB creator Damien Katz gave a pretty cool talk as well, not so much about code as about the personal circumstances which brought him to create CouchDB.

The Powerset guys talk on Katamari, the evolution of Fuzed, was pretty cool to catch as well. I've certainly run into the issue of needing an intelligent proxy in front of a bunch of slow web services, which so far HAProxy has managed to solve, but if I need a more intelligent frontend to the services of our application Katamari is something I certainly intend to check out, at least as soon as it's open sourced.

It was pretty cool to check out Nitrogen as well, which managed to do some pretty impressive and Erlangy things with web services. It's also the best usage of Erlang's record syntax I've ever seen. The demo involved pushing the presently active slide to all the people viewing the demo in their web browser, which I've seen done in Ruby before but I suspect the Erlang version is far less hackish :)

Twitter seemed to be haunting me throughout the conference. I hacked together a script which posted Twitter updates with the #erlangfactory tag to the #erlangfactory channel on freenode. Twitter helped me link up with the people who found the lost AC adapter to my MacBook and also helped me figure out who's Apple remote I accidently snagged after my talk. It was really handy.

However, people also talked to me about my blog post regarding Twitter's switch to Scala, and we all talked about how simple the core problem Twitter is trying to solve actually is and how easily it could be (and has been) implemented in Erlang. The Twitter people did their "due diligence" and decided that Scala was best suited to their needs. Whatever guys, I think Erlang could've help you out considerably. I recall a post on a site like HighScalability (although I can't find it) where Twitter said they evaluated Erlang circa 2007 and the lone developer pitching it couldn't get his prototype to work, and so I guess Erlang isn't applicable there, or something? When the Scala prototype works I guess that's what they use...

The general concensus discussing the matter with various Erlangy people was that Twitter was little more than a massive pub/sub message queue which delivers messages to a backing database (from whence their RoR webapp serves their site), which isn't really that hard of a problem and the kind of problem which is almost ideally suited to Erlang. Yet the Twitter people eschewed Erlang for Scala and on a totally unrelated matter run a perpetually unstable albeit massively hyped service. Way to go, guys.

There's quite a few talks I missed which I want to talk out, particularly a talk given on Haskell. I certainly hope the videos (including mine) get posted soon.

Despite ample conversation about CouchDB there was virtually no discussion of the sort that has Ruby drama queens panties in a bunch, something about a presentation involving scantily clad girls that offended people. So awesome to be in a community that's still small enough to value code over anything else :)

All said it was a great conference and one I look forward to attending (or speaking at again) next year.