Vlog - 2020-09-17
2020-09-17A brief weekly run-down of what I've been doing.
Latest Posts
Asking a tech recruiter
While working I mostly found the attention of recruiters slightly reassuring but often annoying. I think that annoyance is fairly common, usually built up from countless LinkedIn drive-by attempts from unreading keyword-hunting recruiters. I thought that now, out on my own, maybe this legion of recruiters can be my sales department....
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The Mac is losing me
I've been mostly happy using a Mac since I got myself my first computer earned with programmer money. I believe it was a mid 2009 15" MacBook Pro. That was a computer I used at least until 2016 which I consider very decent usable life. At that point I had replaced the hard-drive with an SSD, upgraded the RAM and switched a battery that was worn out. I stopped using it when it just straight died some time in 2016....
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The BEAM marches forward
The BEAM is the virtual machine that Erlang and Elixir runs on. It is widely cited as a battle-tested piece of software though I don't know in which wars it has seen action. It has definitely paid its dues in the telecom space as well as globally scaled projects such as Whatsapp and Discord. It is well suited to tackle soft-realtime distributed systems with heavy concurrency. It has been a good platform chugging along. And with a small team at Ericsson responsible for much of its continuing development it has been managed in a deeply pragmatic way. Erlang has always been a bit of a secret and silent success. Almost no-one uses it if you look at market shares. But among the ones that use it there seems to be a very positive consensus. And then Elixir came and caused a bit of a boom. I think the BEAM has benefited from Elixir and Elixir wouldn't exist without the BEAM. With that bit of background I'd like to shine a light on some cool developments that I think makes the BEAM more interesting or even uniquely interesting in the future....
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