Erlang in Irvine article

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+Title: Erlang in Irvine
+Date: 2019-06-02
+Category: Programming
+Tags: programming, erlang
+
+
+If I were keeping score, so many points were earned over the last week, if not
+by me than by my team. I just returned from a three-day training seminar on the
+basics of the Erlang programming language, taught by [Szymon
+Mentel](https://twitter.com/szymonmentel) of [Erlang
+Solutions](https://www.erlang-solutions.com/). The program was truly an
+introduction, carrying the class, in this case a group of my coworkers, from
+Hello World thru concurrency, with an introduction to distributed programming.
+It was an excellent tutorial and I'd recommend it to anyone interested.
+
+I've been working on the internet for a long time, long enough that some of my
+favorite languages and technologies aren't really used that much anymore (sorry
+Apache and Perl). Because I was a Perl programmer in the late 90's, I read a
+lot fo writing by its charismatic and prolific designer, Larry Wall. Larry would
+write at length about where the various Frankenstein pieces of the language came
+from. This mean dives into Common LISP, Prolog, you name it, and I became a bit
+of a language nerd. Not a language Alpha-nerd - I want to be careful about what
+I claim about myself - but at the very least a neophyte nerd.
+
+Anyway, it's been a while since I've dug into a new language with thoughts of
+actually using it. Typescript was more of a shift than learning a new language.
+Rust and Go are fine but haven't yet captured my imagination. But this opportunity
+to pick up some Erlang has me pretty jazzed, to the surprise of my colleagues as
+it isn't something new and sexy, but a language that was introduced more than
+thirty years ago.
+
+I currently work in the internet voice and video domain, specifically in what is
+being called Unified Communications. Erlang has it's roots in
+telecommunications, so it is no surprise that a number of applications in our
+space are built upon it. There is one project in particular that we will be
+relying upon a great deal in the coming months, such that we will need to
+deviate from the established project roadmap to meet our own business needs.
+
+So, when I was talking about _earning points_ at the beginning of this post,
+here's what I mean:
+
+Our team is being encouraged to:
+
+1. Learn an exotic and powerful language - _10 points_
+1. so that we can contribute to an open source project - _10 points_
+1. and better participate in the open source community - _20 points_
+
+This is very exciting! Since I got started in technology, embracing and
+contributing to open source has been a highly regarded, hacker ideal - even if
+our corporate overlords were resistant. To be able to do this while also
+learning a language and technology quite different than those I've typically
+employed - this should be a very interesting summer!
+
+I also have a side project related to my past work using
+[batman-adv](https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/batman-adv/wiki) on Raspberry
+Pis. Erlang's constructs for binary pattern matching and easy task distribution
+should be amazing for message passing over a mesh.