The Erlang Factory 2009 in Palo Alto was the biggest gathering of Erlang expertise on the West Coast (or ever). Frank & Francesco and the Erlang Training & Consulting Team together with their numerous sponsors ran a solid conference.
The two days featured three tracks and by attending one talk you usually missed out on at least two other really interesting ones. Luckily, most of the sessions got videotaped and the recordings already show up.
Highlights include Cliff Moon’s live-killing of Dynomite nodes that power live.com to demonstrate the fault tolerance of the system (it worked well). Damien talked about why he decided to do CouchDB, his personal, rather than technical talk was well received.
The conference closed with an open discussion about what’s next. The Erlang community has a lot to catch up compared to other open source communities, and different strategies and improvements have been discussed. I hope something comes out of it.
Personally, the Erlang folks are the most relaxed and approachable of all. Robert Virding, one of the three original Erlang designers and developers was fun to talk to and he was genuinely interested in new developments. The matter or “stardom” is completely absent and this was pretty refreshing.
If you missed this Erlang Factory, the next one is in London in June, I hope to see all you European folks there!
