Galicia ❤️ The BEAM
The impressive Galician contributions to the Erlang Ecosystem
We all know about the most renowned Erlang/Elixir centers worldwide, like Sweden, Brazil, California, and London. But the community, even when not huge, is broadly spread. Today we want to celebrate a smaller region that’s home to many amazing contributions to our beloved ecosystem. The birthplace of my ancestors: Galicia!
So, in this unusual style (a collaborative bilingual interview-like article), we’re going to showcase 4 of the many Galicians that have had a profound impact on the language and the people around it…
Laura M. Castro
Ghuapo, ghuapo non é… pero ten uns procesos!!!
Laura got her first Erlang-related “job” (it was a summer internship in the fourth year of her career) because after having taken an elective course called “Functional Programming,” where she learned the language, all she could do was talking to her classmates about its wonders non-stop. She was fascinated with how easy it was to work with multiple processes, multiple nodes, and … reloading code without having to stop the system!!
One day, while at the student representatives’ premises (of whom she was part), someone called to offer an internship. As soon as they mentioned “functional” and “Erlang,” someone handed her the phone without saying another word.
Thanks to that opportunity, the following course, she wrote her Final Thesis exploring how objects could be “simulated” (OOP was starting to take over at the time) in Erlang (using structures, using processes). That Thesis led her to participate in developing a risk assessment system for a large multinational company, which backend was entirely written in Erlang. The first articles arrived at the Erlang Workshop recounting the experience, and the academic world bug bit her. It started with her thesis, then becoming an assistant professor, getting a doctorate … the rest is history!
When / How did you take your first steps in the Erlang ecosystem?
Beyond using the language and reading the mailing lists, my diving into the community coincided with my predoctoral visits to Sweden, hosted by Thomas Arts (now Quviq AB). Being in Gothenburg, it was easy to get to Stockholm, the center where it all started! The Erlang User Conferences helped me put faces together with names, one thing led to another, you know…
What motivated you the most to contribute to the community?
I have always been (even before I met Erlang!) a heartfelt advocate of free software, so contributing, for me, is at the core of software development work.
Prowess
One of the multiple contributions from Laura to the community is her participation in the Prowess Project. A three-year innitiative that got companies and universities from several European countries researching together on methods and tools to improve the quality of web services. Their output was a swath of Erlang open-source libraries.
What’s that thing that stands out about Prowess?
The work that was done, side by side, between companies and universities together trying to design useful tools for the community.
How can people participate, help, or just learn more about it?
Follow the code! There are articles, presentations at Erlang Factories, Erlang User Conferences, Erlang Workshops …
What’s your advice for the next generation of Galician BEAMers?
(this one in Spanish, considering the target audience)
Yo no empecé a programar con 10 años. Llegué a la universidad sabiendo escribir en un procesador de textos y poco más. Tenía la sensación de que todo el mundo me llevaba mucha ventaja.
Pero la programación funcional era desconocida para la gran mayoría (y lo sigue siendo, aunque cada vez menos). Además de gustarme, sentí que si me especializaba en ella, sería más fácil destacar. Sería más fácil conectar con otras personas con una sensibilidad parecida.
No me equivoqué.
Mi madre siempre ha dicho: “¡Vale más ser cabeza de ratón, que cola de león!”
Pablo Costas Sanchez
Se ten que errar, que erre!
For Pablo, everything started back in college. Most of their courses were focused on Java and other imperative languages, which he liked but never to this point; thankfully, they were also taught the basics of functional programming and later on in the Concurrency & Parallelism course had an assignment in Erlang. He found this language so intriguing and interesting that he ended up asking the professor for a book to learn more about it. Javier Paris, the professor, recommended Programming in Erlang by Joe Armstrong. Pablo binge-read it, and that moment defined his love for the language.
Then he had a course by Laura, although this one was in Elixir, which was so damn fun and practical that he tagged along with a friend and participated in that year’s SpawnFest. After that, he knew for sure that he wanted Laura to be his dissertation supervisor. A year later, she proposed the idea of parallelizing PropEr, and he liked it. Jump a few months of hard work and a few talks with Kostis Sagonas into the future, and there it is: PropEr now has parallel and distributed executions!
When / How did you take your first steps in the Erlang ecosystem?
I got into the community because I had an amazing experience during Lambda Days 2020 in Kraków, where I met wonderful peers (pun intended, I owe you all a dinner) and decided I wanted to help grow the community and for it to continue being as awesome as it is. I got my chance at this when Brujo Benavides asked for help organising SpawnFest, to which my fellow members Bryan Paxton, Paulo and Filipe chimed in.
What motivated you the most to contribute to the community?
Being part of a community means giving back to it when possible. I consider that true both for the open-source software we all depend on and for ecosystems themselves, such as the BEAM community. Given that, the next logical step was actually helping out :)
SpawnFest
SpawnFest is an annual 48-hour online software development contest in which teams from around the world get exactly one weekend to create the best BEAM-based applications they can. Participation in SpawnFest is 100% Free of Charge, and all BEAM languages are welcome!
This year, it’s organized by The Fellowship of the Beam (which, of course, includes Pablo).
What’s that thing that stands out about SpawnFest?
Seeing folks from all over the community come together to build these amazing ideas is really inspiring ❤
How can people participate, help, or just learn more about it?
Sign up for the event if you have not already! You can either register your own team of friends or fill in another form to have us hook you up with a team; we can’t wait to see you there!
What’s your advice for the next generation of Galician BEAMers?
(this one in Galician, considering the target audience)
Antes de nada, benvid@s ao clube da xente guai ;)
Agora en serio, se vos gusta a BEAM, xa sexa por Erlang ou por Elixir, tendes empresas de sobra e traballos dabondo: hai unha empresa en A Coruña mesmamente e se non, hoxe en día, a gran maioría aceptan traballo remoto, así podedes ver mundo se queredes ou seguir disfrutando das terras galegas.
En calqueira caso, se tendes dúbidas, poñédevos en contacto :)
Brujo Benavides
(yes, me… deal with it 😎)
Fai que funcione, logo faino bonito e, se realmente o necesitas, faino rápido. O 90 por cento das veces, se o fas fermoso, xa será rápido. Entón, realmente, simplemente faino bonito!
Brujo started writing code when he was 10, on a Commodore, at school. From then on, he never stopped. He moved from BASIC to QBasic, to Visual Basic, to .NET… until he found Haskell and Smalltalk at the University.
Then, Novamens was looking for someone willing to learn Erlang to develop a VoIP server with it. Brujo immediately fell in love with the language. A few years later, after joining Inaka, he was already giving his first talk at the Erlang Factory SF in 2012 and answering questions from no other than Joe Armstrong himself. 🤯
When / How did you take your first steps in the Erlang ecosystem?
Inakos’ culture was tightly bound to open-source and, as such, we contributed many many projects, tools and libraries that we are still maintaining today, even when the company was dissolved in 2017.
After joining Erlang Solutions, I became a trainer, too and I had the honor to deliver some lessons with Robert Virding, among others.I started writing this blog back in 2016, mostly to collect the funny bits of my experience with the language, but it grew so much beyond that. So, when the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation became a thing… I knew I had to join!
Now, I work at NextRoll (previously known as AdRoll), a company that also has an amazing culture and gives me and my colleagues lots of chances to keep contributing back to the community, particularly building development tools and mentoring people.
What motivated you the most to contribute to the community?
I’m a big fan of open-source, in general. We use tons of open-source software every day, every second… If we have the chance to contribute back to the people who developed it and forward to more people that may use our tools, I think we must.
Now, particularly for the Erlang Ecosystem, this is a community that welcomed me with open-arms even when I was just some totally unknown mate-drinker from the far south. At the time, that was totally unusual for me and I valued it a lot. It made my desire to contribute even stronger and it still does to this day. Lately, I’ve been developing tools for Erlang (like the formatter, hank, elvis, etc.) mostly because I felt that was one of the things Erlang devs needed the most.
Hank
rebar3_hank is an oxbow code detector for Erlang. It helps you remove dead code that pollutes your projects, like unused macros, unused record fields, and other nasty stuff…
It is developed by Pablo Brud, Diego Calero, and Brujo… and it will soon have an associated paper published by Laura and Brujo for the Erlang Workshop at the upcoming ICFP2021.
What’s that thing that stands out about Hank?
The best thing about Hank is that it’s a tool that other languages don’t have! It might as well be the first time in a long long time that you can do something with your Erlang code, that you can’t do in your Elixir projects. 😎
From a personal perspective, as well, it opened up the doors of the scientific community for me. We were able to write an academic paper about it and give this small hackweek project a certain class and elegance that others don’t have. It can now sit at the grown-ups table, with dialyzer, RefactorErl, and others.
How can people participate, help, or just learn more about it?
Use it! Find bugs and report them.
And, of course, send all the PRs to https://github.com/AdRoll/rebar3_hank
What’s your advice for the next generation of Galician BEAMers?
(this one in Spanish, considering the target audience)
El mundo de la BEAM no es sencillo para los recién llegados, eso es cierto.
No hay escasez de buenos trabajos, pero la mayoría de ellos requiere cierto nivel de experiencia y conocimiento que impide que los estudiantes o recién graduados ingresen fácilmente.
Se están realizando esfuerzos para superar esta brecha. Empresas como Erlang Solutions o LambdaClass tienen programas de capacitación que pueden ayudarlos a obtener la experiencia deseada, y no están solas. Pero es cierto que las oportunidades laborales no surgen en todos los rincones, como ocurre con otros lenguages.
Por otro lado, una vez que se consigue un trabajo en un proyecto basado en la BEAM, no hay vuelta atrás. Nada se sentirá igual después de esa experiencia. No necesitan confiar en mi palabra, simplemente observen cuántos lenguajes están agregando soporte para modelo de actores, pattern-matching, árboles de supervisión, deep tracing… Todas cosas que Erlang ya proveía cuando yo lo conocí hace más de una década… Les garantizo que, una vez que tengan todas esas herramientas a su disposición, van a querer usarlas donde quiera que vayan.
En pocas palabras: conseguir su primer trabajo con Erlang o Elixir puede ser un desafío, ¡pero es uno que realmente vale la pena!
Y una forma realmente genial y divertida de comenzar ese proceso es participar de SpawnFest y/o solicitar una beca de estudios de la EEF.
Miriam Pena
“nunca choveu que non escanpara”
(repetir para si cando as cousas rompen en produción)
Miriam Pena is a computer engineer, graduated from the University of A Coruña who is passionate about building computer systems distributed over several continents that work for millions of simultaneous users. She has worked as an Erlang specialist worldwide, including Sweden, Egypt, the USA, Ireland, and Spain.
Two years ago, she founded, along with other community leaders from Erlang and Elixir, a non-profit foundation called the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, based in California. Miriam is a member of the board of directors and also leads its Education working group. This non-profit foundation is dedicated to promoting technologies and languages such as Erlang and Elixir, based on the Erlang virtual machine.
She got the Ada Byron Award in 2018 from the Galician College of Computer Engineers and was listed as one of the Inspiring Female Staff Engineers to Watch that same year. This recognition leads her to commit to being more visible and encouraging other women to get into technology.
Since 2015 she works at the marketing company NextRoll, in San Francisco, where she is in charge of designing and implementing critical parts of the real-time data collection used in their Marketing solutions.
When / How did you take your first steps in the Erlang ecosystem?
My first internship was at Igalia, developing a V-LAN switch in Erlang. Then I did my final degree project extending that to make it work with better performance. Little by little, I fell in love with the ecosystem. Later, at Nomasystems, I developed my first highly concurrent systems in production, working on renewable energy, social networks and telecommunications systems … and I simply could not stop…
What motivated you the most to contribute to the community?
I deeply believe in the potential of the Erlang & Elixir ecosystem and the community of developers that are part of it.
The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation
The EEF has a clear goal: to grow and support a diverse community around the Erlang and Elixir ecosystem by helping to develop open-source technologies and projects based on their languages and runtime.
What’s that thing that stands out about the EEF?
From my perspective, it’s the hard work that I’m doing to increase the diversity of the community and for this reason (with the collaboration of the Education group) we are promoting initiatives that increase the number of language users around the world. Lately we are working in collaboration with conferences and workshops to be able to send students and underrepresented people in tech to conferences for free.
How can people participate, help, or just learn more about it?
Perhaps the best thing to do is to just join the foundation’s slack workspace and start talking with us.
What’s your advice for the next generation of Galician BEAMers?
(this one in Spanish, considering the target audience)
Les animaría a probar a programar en Elixir porque tiene una gran comunidad, buena documentación, y gran demanda de trabajo bien pagado (especialmente en remoto). Las aplicaciones escritas en la BEAM escalan muy fácilmente y son fiables. Además, aprender a programar en la BEAM te va a hacer programar mejor en otros lenguajes.
But Miriam, Pablo, Brujo, and Laura are certainly not alone. There are many more Galician folks in the Erlang Ecosystem. So, stay tuned because like our grandmothers used to say…
Quedaches con fame? Fágoche algunha entrevista máis?
