On the beginning… I wrote this blog post for myself. Myself from 10 years ago, to be precise. This is a post I wish I could send back in time and show to myself. I’m sure it would change my direction and career. If you have heard about Erlang but are not sure if it is worth giving it a try…or you just love Erlang and would like to hear my praise for it, please read on.
Observability-first Approach Tracing as a tool is immensely productive. It cannot be overestimated - especially in production, but also in development when debugging our own mistakes. In the previous article I covered why we should use that facility and why they invented it in the first place. After first sight and couple of rounds, you fall in love with that tool. Right after you gain some experience, more questions start to arise.
Debugging Concurrency Let me tell you a story. We have deployed a new version of software on the whole fleet. Hundreds of machines in 4 different regions around the world. We observed our metrics, inspected our logs - nothing there. Success, another deployment without any issues. Fast forward two days, and we received a customer support ticket to investigate. One of our integrations complained that they are observing a significant amount of errors when calling our endpoints, in two distinct regions.
Erlang vs Node.js & Java Most of the software being developed these days is implemented using Node.js or Java. Ten years ago, around 2006-2009 you would say: Java or Ruby on Rails. No matter how far you look backwards, answer would never contain Erlang. Question is, why? Is it because it’s a functional language? Maybe because it’s old? It’s a hard question but I believe that Erlang is not just a general purpose language.
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