Berlin Erlang Factory Lite

Today the Berlin Erlang Factory Lite took place - more than ten talks about Erlang and distributed systems. Compared to the ErlangCamp the talks were about basic concepts and some projects using Erlang, and not so much about coding and hands-on sessions.

One of the highlights was the talk held by Joe Armstrong, one of the co-inventors of Erlang. His talk was a nice wrap-up about distributed systems, reliability, failure detection and recovery, messaging, consistent hashing and the "let it crash" paradigm. He also mentioned the six rules of reliable systems: isolation, concurrency, failure detection, fault identification, live code updates and stable storage.

The more technical presentations dealt with Erlang's BEAM VM, Raft (a distributed consensus protocol) and the use of Erlang's built-in functions trace and trace_pattern for debugging purposes. The details about the components of the BEAM VM by Robert Virding (also a co-inventor of Erlang) were quite interesting: the scheduler (one per thread and by default one thread per core), processes, memory management (like garbage collection) and areas (like the atom table - global and of fixed size!) and the async thread pool (important for asynchronous I/O, as normal file I/O blocks the scheduler!).

Amongst other project presentations, Travis CI and Project FiFo presented theirs projects who are either based on Erlang or at least on distributed systems.

Nordwärts

Hamburg-HafenCity: auf dem Weg vom Hotel nach Wilhelmsburg - im Hintergrund der Marco-Polo-Tower

IBA-Projekt Energiebunker: Ausgangspunkt des Quartierspazierganges durch das Reiherstiegviertel in Wilhelmsburg

Abendstimmung auf dem Klütjenfelder Hauptdeich am Spreehafen

Abendlicher Abschluss: ein sehr nettes Punk-Konzert im Hafenklang - Grøbüdels aus Hamburg und Die Skeptiker aus Berlin.

Wochenmarkt unter Hochbahngleisen: der Isemarkt

Kaffee, Kuchen und dicke Pötte: Willkomm-Höft in Wedel

Auf der Fähre zwischen Travemünde und Priwall

Klützer Winkel: abends am Ostseestrand hinter dem Schlossgut Groß Schwansee

Der Blick vom Balkon meines Hotelzimmers

Kurz vor der Abreise: ein letzter Blick auf das Gesamtensemble

St.-Konstantin-und-Helena-Kirche

St.-Konstantin-und-Helena-Kirche

Monitorama EU 2013

Monitorama EU came to Berlin - 2 days full of interesting talks and workshops on the field of monitoring and open source. All this took place in the Urania.
For me, the most notable talks on the first day were the two keynotes by Dylan Richard and by Danese Cooper and the talks held by Katherine Daniels and by Ryan Smith.
Dylan worked behind the scenes of the most recent Obama campaign and gave an insight into their monitoring strategy and their scalability challenges, whilst Danese shared some of her experiences as an Open Source Evangelist.

From Danese Cooper's presentation: propaganda against open source

Katherine's talk was about frustration concerning monitoring in classical Ops teams and about how to improve the situation by reducing complexity and re-focusing. Ryan's very entertaining talk took the weaknesses of monitoring systems in aircrafts as an example and explained how to deal with those weaknesses and what to learn from that.
Day 2 consisted of two parallel sessions: one for talks and one for workshops. This gave a good mixture of theoretical and practical information.
The day started for me with a talk by Reza Spagnolo - a colleague of mine -  about adaptive application architecture. The talks by Jeff Weinstein and by David Goodlad were also very good. Jeff gave a good overview of the different roles in a company and their expectations concerning metric data. And David emphasized that business metrics should be designed before system metrics and that alarms should be based on business metrics.
The workshops I attended were about Kale (by Abe Stanway), big graphite installations (by Devdas Bhagat) and graph automation based on tools like collectd, statsd and graphite (by Michael Gorsuch) - all in all very nice and definitely worth the time spent.

Seattle

Mal wieder für die Firma nach Seattle - viel Arbeit, dennoch ein paar Eindrücke:

Nach dem nicht gerade exquisiten Essen im Flieger: Burger & Co. bei Lil Woody's

Blick vom Büro auf Space Needle und den Puget Sound - und Flagge auf Halbmast ... 9/11 in Seattle

... und der Blick auf Lake Union

Eisherstellung auf Bestellung und mit Hilfe flüssigen Stickstoffs: Sub Zero

Mittagspause an einem der beliebten Food Trucks ... hier habe ich das erste Mal Poutine außerhalb Quebecs vorgefunden

Amsterdam

Abendstimmung - Oosterdokseiland

ErlangCamp 2013 Amsterdam

I first got in contact with Erlang, when we evaluated Riak which is written in Erlang for a project some years ago - and we had a quick look at its source code.

Nowadays, as distributed systems have become more and more common, Erlang sees some kind of revival. So, I decided to join ErlangCamp 2013 in Amsterdam to enhance my Erlang skills - actually, it was more of a fresh start with Erlang for me ...

This conference was mainly dedicated to beginners like me and started with a very good introduction into the core language concepts (pattern matching, recursion, list processing). The next talks were about OTP (behaviours, process supervision, gen_server etc.) and logging.

The second day started with an excellent introduction into distributed systems based on Erlang - that was some kind of enlightenment. Followed by a talk about testing with EUnit and QuickCheck (can be found on QuviQ's page), the conference concluded with a talk about releases and deployment, which I unfortunately missed, as I had to catch my train.

Overall the conference was definitely worth the money (Thanks to Spil Games for sponsoring and organizing this event!) - excellent talks, a good portion of hands-on coding and a lot of people around to ask for support. The sample code is available on GitHub.

Bring your own laptop and code some Erlang - and you get some nice stickers ... and a shirt.