(Badge photo by Kenji Rikitake)
It's already been near a month since Erlang Factory SF Bay 2014 as I'm writing this blog article. It was my fifth Erlang Factory, consecutive once a year since 2010. The topic I've talked are so diverse:
- 2010: SSH RPC (sponsored by NSIRG, NICT, Japan)
- 2011: SFMT on Erlang (sponsored by ACCMS, Kyoto University)
- 2012: IPv6 example of DNS simultaneous resolution with IPv4 (sponsored by IIMC/ACCMS, Kyoto University)
- 2013: Riak on amateur radio data analysis (sponsored by Basho Technologies)
- 2014: Star Trek game revisited (this year no sponsorship - I paid all by myself - thanks Erlang Solutions for accepting my talk proposal!)
The topic list shows how broad range of subjects and topics which Erlang and OTP can cover.
Highlights of this year
There are so many things I have to write about for Erlang Factory in this year 2014. Listing the topics (before I forget) here:
- My erltrek implementation of the Star Trek game (immediately modified into a completely new thing, with a great help and massive contribution from Andreas Stenius)
- Erlang Foundation and Intermediate Certificates (Foundation: passed, Intermediate: failed.)
- Concuerror (invitation-only) workshop by Kostis Sagonas
- Elixir tutorial by one of the Erlang Gang of Four, Robert Virding
- Fréd Hébert's presentation and autograph on LYSE
- ... and many more
So let's start from the erltrek.
Why Star Trek?
The ultimate reason is: no one seemed to did it. Period. It was a completely improvised idea, after I was browsing the FreeBSD old games library, reading the BSD Trek code, written by Eric Allman (one of the Sendmail people), in ANSI C89. The BSD trek's last update date was in 1993, so it was a 20-year old code. I decided to rebuild the game in the following procedure:
- Read the C code
- Port it to Lua so that I can at least read through all the C functions
- Rebuild the Lua code (luatrek) into more Erlang-ish one
Was the strategy successful? I think it was not bad, but the part of rebuilding into Erlang was revealed utterly insufficient, soon after I opened up the code. I will describe the reason later in another article, but the main reason of failure was that my thinking and design of the code were completely procedural, neither fully functional, nor Erlang process-based. I have to write that I've been doing the coding and reviewing of the erltrek software even after I come back to Japan from the Erlang Factory event; that is one of the reason why this article gets so late. It's still a work in progress, as of 31-MAR-2014.
Venue
Marines' Memorial Club and Hotel again hosted the Erlang Factory. In fact they also hosted a part of JavaScript event series called JSFest at the theatre (a very nice and large one) on Sunday 9-MAR-2014. There was no fire alarm this year (as it happened in the 2011 and 2013 events.) I didn't socialize much, as I don't as usual (I'm not really an extrovert person), but this year I had a few dinner hangouts with the Erlang all stars and I really enjoyed them. The hotel service was very good and my favorite chicken-flavored S.O.S. Oatmeal was always there at the breakfast; and the catering was very good as well.
People
I met a lot of people. Monika, Andra, and Alison of Erlang Solutions, and all the staff members including the volunteers, kept running the conference and all the other events very smoothly. Meeting with old Erlang friends, especially the Francophones including Fréd Hébert, Loïc Hoguin, and Benoit Chesneau, was always intriguing (especially when the three were having a very heated discussion in French.) Greeting Basho people was also nice. I will not mention all the people in this article, but it was nice to meet a newcomer from Japan, Keisuke Takahashi; he showed a strong interest into the Elixir language and I'm sure he'll drive a community in Tokyo soon.
[To be continued in another article]
