Modern CPUs have continued to follow Moore’s Law, continuously offering stunning increases in capability with every generation. However, software in general has not kept pace, particularly in terms of fully leveraging the power of the latest multi and manycore CPUs.

The root of the challenge is Amdahl’s Law — the speedup in a parallel system is governed by the amount of serialization in the code. Writing parallel algorithms can be hard — and hard to write correctly. And even when written correctly, locking conventions for shared state in traditional programming languages can introduce serialization bottlenecks.

Erlang has proven to be a phenomenal platform for scaling on multi and manycore systems, thanks to its inherent concurrency. However, even then there are challenges to fully harnessing the power of modern chips.

Alex's talk will cover the latest work in scaling Erlang, and in particular will focus in on using big data analysis techniques to better understand and improve Erlang programs.

Alex Gounares is the founder and CEO of Concurix Corporation. Concurix is a new startup focused on building an extremely scalable and high performance operating system for modern data centers. Concurix is headquartered in Kirkland, Washington.

Prior to Concurix, Gounares served as AOL's Chief Technology Officer. In this role, he lead all aspects of AOL's technology strategy, platform development and external technology partnerships. He was responsible for all of AOL's global engineering, IT, and operations functions. In addition, he served as a member of the company's Global Executive Operating Committee.

Gounares joined AOL from Microsoft, where he was Corporate Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the company's Online Services Division. During his tenure at Microsoft, Gounares led significant strategic and technical operations for some of the company's most important projects including Microsoft's global advertising platform, Bing search, MSN and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Gounares also served for three years as Technology Advisor to Microsoft Chairman and founder Bill Gates, as well as Corporate Vice President of Corporate Strategy in Microsoft's Finance Department.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 1993, Gounares worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has founded four startups and is also an inventor on more than 130 U.S. patents filed and pending. Gounares holds a bachelor's degree cum laude in Computer Science from Princeton University.

In this talk, you will learn about the architecture and setup that the Huffington Post built to power their realtime websocket based commenting framework. Leveraging RabbitMQ, SockJS, Cowboy and Erlang, they were able to build and design a highly scalable, customizable solution to power realtime comments. You will learn about some of the pitfalls they hit, as well as some of the improvements they would like to make to take their platform to the next level.

Talk objectives:

• Understanding why we chose to go the Erlang and SockJS route for our commenting platform
• How we integrate RabbitMQ routing to power our subscription architecture
• How we manage subscriptions for realtime "channels"
• Extending the framework into an open source solution
• Enabling other mechanisms for publishing comments outside of RabbitMQ

For people interested in leveraging Erlang to power a realtime capability on their web applications, this talk will provide oversight into what we learned in the last year, how the pieces of the architecture fit together and how you might customize a websocket solution to suit your needs.

As the current VP of Engineering for the Huffington Post, Adam is responsible for leading the entire engineering team for all consumer facing products including Huffingtonpost.com, Huffpost Live, community products and advertising platforms. Prior to Huffington Post, Adam was the SVP Technology at Thomson Reuters where he lead the technology and platform team for all of collaboration and multimedia initiatives within the organization. Adam is a strong believer in open source and loves being entrenched in emerging technologies.

Garrett will dive into specific features that make Erlang stand out from other languages.

• The motivation for creating Erlang
• Syntax features that simplify building reliable software
• How Erlang applications are logically constructed
• Process isolation and concurrency
• Process supervision and fault tolerance

You'll come away with an appreciation for the types of problems Erlang is best suited to solve and Erlang's approach to solving them.

Garrett Smith is programmer at CloudBees, a leading platform-as-a-service vendor, where he leads the use of Erlang to manage platform services and infrastructure. He has over 20 years development experience and specializes in distributed systems and reliable software. Garrett organizes the Chicago Erlang User Group and an occasionally teaches Erlang classes. He's the author of the e2, an Erlang library that simplifies the process of writing correct OTP application.

Fault Tolerance is baked into the very genes of Erlang/OTP — something that ends up being amazingly useful when you are building any kind of system. Remember, your clients and co-workers will find new ways to break things, ways that you could never have imagined in your wildest dreams. This is the reason to use Erlang. Once you get it, it completely changes the way you approach development, and you will find yourself writing "erlang" in whatever language you happen to be using. In this presentation, Mahesh will dive into Buddha-nature of Erlang/OTP, pointing out how the various features of the language tie together into one seamless Fault Tolerant whole.

The six laws of fault tolerance covered:

• Concurrency
• Error Encapsulation
• Fault Detection
• Fault Identification
• Code Upgrade
• Stable Storage

Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya is a V.P. of R&D at Ubiquiti Networks - a manufacturer of disruptive technology platforms for emerging markets. He has been involved in 'Internet Stuff' since Day Zero (remember Gopher?), and has spent the recent past building out Erlang-based massively concurrent Cloud Services and VoIP platforms. He has the - dubious - honor of being involved in creating the first web/e-commerce system, the first Java based financial services platform, as well as the first Erlang-based cloud PBX, three products he may never live down. He was previously the CTO of Vocalocity after its merger with Aptela (where he was a founder and CTO). Before that, he was V.P. of Development at Neoglyphics Inc, and CTO of Proxicom where he also led the Technology practice. He holds a B. Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology - Kanpur, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame.

Ever wondered how a neural network works? I did. Does it really model the brain? I had thought question, too. So I thought I'd learn the basics.

In Handbook of Neural Evolution Through Erlang, Gene Sher makes a case for Erlang as a perfect language to closely model the way neurons work. Starting at some basic principles, he builds a neural network and then moves towards using evolutionary algorithms to evolve that brain into a super genius mad scientist awesome bot!

In this talk, I'll save you the task of working through the 800+ textbook and give you a high-level overview of some core concepts in using Erlang to build a neural network.

And that's not all! We'll also look at what that code looks like ported to Elixir, the language all the cool cats are talking about. Two Languages In One Talk! MADNESS!

Corey Haines started programming at the age of 10, on a computer his father (also a programmer) bought for him. He played lots of computer games, and when he couldn't win the games, he learned to read the source code and edit the outcome. These "winning games" were his first software programs. He continued to hack, grew up, and began working as a professional software developer.

After 12 years of coding for money, Corey said: "Enough!" — and went on a year-long, Journeyman pair-programming tour. Travelling the world, coding for room and board, he spent his time teaching, learning, and living. Imagine a bee that cross pollinates software knowledge instead of flowers; that bee was Corey. And instead of wings, he had a little red car.

Since that tour ended in 2009, Corey has focused his attention on helping developers improve their fundamental software design skills through the use of focused-practice events, such as Coderetreat. He also consults for business owners, helping them get the most value out of their software strategies. When not on the road, he spends his time building projects and products.

This talk will summarize Susan's journey of discovery (and often frustration) while building software as an application developer at trading firms and their technology partners. Her journey begins in the land of imperative Object-Oriented languages (C++, Java, and Python) and she finds her way to the kingdom of functional languages like Erlang.

Talk highlights will include examples taken from her experience building middle office software systems at trading firms first in Java and C++, and later in Erlang and C/C++ to compare and contrast approaches.

Susan has worked in systems and infrastructure at large scale SaaS companies such as Salesforce.com. She has worked in application development at startups in finance and media/publishing, and developed software for front- and middle- office systems at trading firms before that.

Susan Potter's academic background is quantitative in nature. After graduating the University of Manchester with a BSc in Mathematics, she worked for two global investment banks in London, then moved to build a B2B trading platform at a software startup in San Francisco, CA (US). Since then she has led projects and programs at a leading global hedge fund and a US investment bank (both in Chicago) providing advice and leadership on front-, middle- and back-office trading system analysis, architecture and development. More recently she has been delivering multi-tenant application architectures for SaaS (Software as a Service) shops and automating their deployment into virtualized environments, both in-house and commercial providers such as Amazon’s EC2, Slicehost, Linode and others.

Ruby on Rails is a near ubiquitous choice when choosing to build a web application due to its promises of rapid application development and a growing ecosystem of libraries. However, once you start to color outside of the lines that the framework provides, you end up authoring more code to work around assumptions inherent in its design. This talk will look at an application which started as a prototype in Ruby on Rails, and eventually ended up as a Erlang web application. We will look at the benefits of writing your application in Erlang, specifically scalability, maintenance, testability, and then explore various deployment options for getting your application in front of users.

Christopher Meiklejohn is a Software Engineer with Basho Technologies, Inc. where he focuses on building rich web applications for Riak using Erlang and JavaScript. Before joining Basho, he worked at Swipely, a loyalty program startup based in Providence where he maintained critical infrastructure components written in Ruby. Christopher is also a graduate student in computer science at Brown University in Providence RI, where he studies formal verification and distributed systems.

When you think of Web application development today, you may think of Ruby, Python, or PHP. Erlang, however, is not known as a language for Web development. Ironically, Erlang's unique features make it ideal as a Web platform - specifically its ability to handle massive scale while maintaining high reliability.

In this session, you'll hear from a panel of Web application experts who use Erlang to build Web servers and frameworks. Each will present a proven Erlang technology that demonstrates how Erlang can be leveraged to build Web applications. You'll learn where Erlang shines and where it struggles in this important field.

After graduating from Williams College with a bachelor's degree in physics, Evan moved to California where he slung a pager for Amazon.com, devised monitoring systems for IMVU, and moonlighted as an Nginx module developer for 2 years. The experiences led him to believe in the importance of reliable systems and the power of non-blocking I/O, and hence, to Erlang. He is now the maintainer of the ErlyDTL template compiler and the author of Chicago Boss, a full-stack Erlang web framework. Since 2008 Evan has been pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago, where he specializes in econometric computational methods.

Sean Cribbs is a Software Engineer at Basho Technologies, where he hacks on Riak, the fault-tolerant, highly-scalable distributed database. Prior to Basho, Sean was a freelance developer and consultant who also managed the development of the open-source Radiant web publishing system.

Jesse has 16 years of development experience and is the owner and lead developer for Sigma Star Systems, a firm that specializes in web application development. The company's current flagship product, BracketPal, is a sports league and tournament management system built with the Nitrogen Web Framework. In open source, Jesse is the project lead for the Nitrogen Web Framework and the author of the qdate library for date and timezone management in Erlang.

Todd started his software engineering career as a 2nd tier support analyst for a Cobol payroll application and quickly started looking for greener pastures. He wound up at Orbitz as a Java programmer and ran across Erlang after discovering that Java’s threading model gave him headaches. He was fortunate enough to work on Orbitz’s Erlang stack for two years before moving on to manage a team of engineers focusing on site reliability and capacity. He continues to promote Erlang at Orbitz every chance he gets.

Steve Vinoski is an architect at Basho Technologies in Cambridge, MA, USA. He's worked on distributed systems and middleware systems for nearly 30 years, including distributed object systems, service-oriented systems, and RESTful web services. His interest in software quality and development productivity led Steve to start exploring and using Erlang in 2006, and he's used it as as his primary development language ever since.

Garrett will moderate this session.