Francesco Cesarini, Erlang Training and Consulting

Francesco Cesarini is the founder and Technical Director of Erlang Training and Consulting. He is also a co-author of Erlang Programming, a book published by O'Reilly Media. Having started his career as an intern at Ericsson's computer science lab, the birth place of Erlang, and has used the language on a daily basis for the last 15 years. He has worked with flagship Erlang projects both within and outside of Ericsson, including the R1 release of the OTP middleware and the AXD301 Switch. He has taught Erlang/OTP to hundreds of professionals and undergraduate students alike.

Soon after Erlang was released as Open Source, he founded Erlang Training and Consulting. With offices in the UK, Sweden, Poland (and soon the US), they have become the world leaders in Erlang based consulting, contracting, support, training and systems development. Their client base is spread on five continents and ranges from small start-ups to blue chip companies. In his role as Technical Director, he is currently leading the research, development and consulting teams.

He is active in the Erlang community not only through regularly talks, seminars and tutorials at conferences worldwide, but also through his involvement in international research projects. He organises local Erlang user groups and with the help of his colleagues and runs the Trapexit Erlang community website.

Presentation: "Functional and Concurrent Programming Languages Applied : Introduction"

Track: Functional and Concurrent Programming Languages Applied

Time: Thursday 10:30 - 10:45

Location: Abbey Room

Presentation: "Thinking in a Highly Concurrent, mostly-functional language"

Track: Solutions Track (Friday)

Time: Friday 14:15 - 15:15

Location: Rutherford Room

Abstract:

Yale Professor Alan Perlis once wrote, "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."

The Erlang programming language has received much attention because of its scalable and intuitive approach to concurrency. But the notion of concurrency is as fundamental to Erlang as object-orientation is to Java, and to really appreciate its power, you need to learn to /think/ Erlang.

This talk illustrates by example how embracing the Erlang way of thinking about problems leads to scalable and fault-tolerant designs. It will describe three ways of clustering Erlang nodes within the server side domain.

Through these case studies, we will describe how Erlang, and more specifically, concurrency is used and applied. If you need to scale your Erlang system, this is the talk to go to.