Erlang Factory - Kevin Smith, Pragmatic Programmer author

Kevin Smith

Pragmatic Programmer author

Hypothetical Labs, Inc.

Kevin Smith has, at various times, been a network administrator, DBA, developer, team lead and trainer over his 14 year career. He ﬁrst learned about Erlang in 2006 via Joe Armstrong's excellent “Programming Erlang” and has never looked back. He attended the first (and only?) Erlang Studio where he was asked to produce what became the popular PragProg screencast series "Erlang In Practice". Until recently, Kevin was a developer at Engine Yard where he worked on a distributed systems management application using Erlang. Kevin founded Hypothetical Labs in April of this year to focus on Erlang full time. He is also the co-author of the upcoming book "Erlang Web Application Development".

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Erlang in Practice

Kevin Smith is Giving the Following Talks

Writing an XMPP Client in Erlang

Many languages today have at least one good XMPP client library. Ruby? Check. Java? Check. Python? Check. Even so-called "academic" languages like Haskell have at least one XMPP client. Erlang -- a language bred for message passing and concurrency -- is sadly lacking a good client. In this talk, I will describe how I used Erlang's core strengths to build a working XMPP client in 5 days. I'll also share the lessons I learned using Erlang to rapidly prototype and deliver a working solution.