18 or so years ago, I was a phone monkey for a government department who was initially learning to code for fun, but quickly realised programming could be a great way to earn a living.
I read about Erlang on /r/programming, which was having a new fad for a new shiny language, as was the custom back then.
And I desperately followed all the /r/programming fads because I was worried that I'd end up irrelevant if I wasn't skilled up in the latest Haskell web framework.
But one of those fads was Erlang, and it intrigued me so much, that I ended up printing Mr Armstrong's thesis, stuck it in a manila folder, and read it, slowly, cover to cover while waiting for, or riding on, my bus to my contact centre job, and I've still got it in my bookcase.
His thinking on resiliency in the face of inevitable failures, and on safe concurrency, has shaped my thinking, and proved invaluable repeatedly and is very relevant today. It's like their phone switches were distributed microservices running in a container orchestrator, before it was cool.
But one of those fads was Erlang, and it intrigued me so much, that I ended up printing Mr Armstrong's thesis, stuck it in a manila folder, and read it
I read about Erlang on /r/programming, which was having a new fad for a new shiny language, as was the custom back then.
And I desperately followed all the /r/programming fads because I was worried that I'd end up irrelevant if I wasn't skilled up in the latest Haskell web framework.
But one of those fads was Erlang, and it intrigued me so much, that I ended up printing Mr Armstrong's thesis, stuck it in a manila folder, and read it, slowly, cover to cover while waiting for, or riding on, my bus to my contact centre job, and I've still got it in my bookcase.
His thinking on resiliency in the face of inevitable failures, and on safe concurrency, has shaped my thinking, and proved invaluable repeatedly and is very relevant today. It's like their phone switches were distributed microservices running in a container orchestrator, before it was cool.