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Francesco Cesarini, Founder of Erlang Solutions & author of Erlang Programming

Francesco Cesarini

Biography: Francesco Cesarini

Francesco Cesarini has used Erlang on a daily basis since the mid-90s, having started his career as an intern at Ericsson’s computer science laboratory, the birthplace of Erlang. He moved on to Ericsson’s Erlang training and consulting arm working on the first release of the OTP middleware, applying it to turnkey solutions and flagship telecom applications.

In 1999, soon after Erlang was released as open source, he founded Erlang Solutions. With offices in the UK, Sweden, Poland (and soon the US), they have become the world leaders in Erlang based consulting, contracting, training, systems development and support services. In 2008, they launched the Erlang Factory conferences. At Erlang Solutions, Francesco has worked on major Erlang based projects both within and outside Ericsson, and in his current role as Technical Director, is setting the strategy and vision of the company while supervising the technical teams.

Francesco 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, runs the trapexit Erlang community website. He is the co-author of Erlang Programming, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2009. With whatever time he has left over, he teaches Erlang to graduates and undergraduates at Oxford University and the IT University of Gothenburg. You can follow his ramblings (mainly on Erlang and Erlang Solutions) on twitter.

Training: Erlang 101 - Your intro to Actor and Multi-Core Programming

Track: Training / Time: Monday 09:00 - 12:00 / Location: Erlang Solutions

Erlang's basic features are a perfect match for massively concurrent, distributed cloud environments. Being rooted in an actor model with no shared memory, the complexity of multi-core programming is hidden from the developers, allowing them to focus on the program. This tutorial will introduce Erlang and its actor model, explaining how it is positioning itself to win the multi-core challenge.

Contents

Basic & Sequential Erlang
 This section deals with Erlang data types and pattern matching. Functions, and modules are discussed. It continues by introducing recursion, with a special emphasis on different recursive patterns, including tail recursion.

Concurrent Programming
 This section describes the creation of processes and their life span. It looks at sending and receiving messages, selective reception, and passing data in the messages. It continues with the various uses of time outs and registering processes, and terminates by showing the generic process code structure. We conclude this section by introducing the simple but powerful error handling mechanisms in processes. It looks at process links, exit signals and their propagation semantics.

Multi-Core Programming This section guides the users through examples and scalability issues when writing programs you expect to double in speed when doubling your cores. It covers tools and programming techniques you can use to detect and avoid bottlenecks.

In order to get the most out of this tutorial, you must have a good grasp of other programming languages. This will be a hands on tutorial. Make sure you come with your laptop having installed Erlang and your favourite editor.

Please note that this tutorial will be held at:
Erlang Solutions, New Loom House, 101 Back Church Lane, London, E1 1LU

Training: OTP, the Middleware for Concurrent Distributed Scalable Architectures

Track: Training / Time: Tuesday 09:00 - 16:00 / Location: Erlang Solutions

While Erlang is a powerful programming language used to build distributed, fault tolerant systems with requirements of high availability, these complex systems require middleware in the form of reusable libraries, release, debugging and maintenance tools together with design principles and patterns used to style your concurrency model and your architecture.

In this talk, Francesco will introduce the building blocks that form OTP, the defacto middleware that ships with the Erlang/OTP distribution. He will cover OTP’s design principles, describing how they provide software engineering guidelines that enable developers to structure systems in a scalable and fault tolerant way, without the need to reinvent the wheel. 

Please note that this tutorial will be held at:
Erlang Solutions, New Loom House, 101 Back Church Lane, London, E1 1LU