Code BEAM V Europe
Code BEAM V Europe took place virtually from 19 to 21 May. I attended the conference and was able to gain exciting insights into the future of the Erlang ecosystem, discovering new techniques and development tools.
What is the BEAM?
BEAM is the virtual machine at the heart of the Erlang Open Telecom Platform (OTP for short). It is part of the Erlang Run-Time System (ERTS for short), which compiles Erlang source code into bytecode. These bytecode files with the extension .beam are executed on the virtual machine.
In addition to Erlang and Elixir, there are many other programming languages that run on BEAM. The Code BEAM conference series brings all these languages together and offers great training opportunities for beginners and advanced users.
My highlights
Fireside Chat: Phoenix LiveView
One of the most exciting topics in the Elixir ecosystem is the development of Phoenix LiveView and the fundamental change in web development that comes with it. This session provided an informative insight into the current state of development and future plans.
COVID-19 contact tracing on the BEAM
This talk presented how contact tracing can work on the BEAM, the technical challenges encountered and how these were overcome. The Hygeia project presented is also open source and will be used for other purposes in the long term.
Fireside Chat: Code Design
An important lesson from this session: Don’t be too clever! Code is only written 15% of the time - the other 85% of the time is maintenance. There were also helpful tips on how to deal with metaprogramming.
Keynote: Machine Learning auf der BEAM
When you get to see the inventor of the Elixir programming language live, it’s always something special. This time is no exception: José Valim brings his new Nx library for machine learning to BEAM and presents the current state of development.
