BEAM There, Done That

In 2021, Erlang got something it had been promised for years: a Just-In-Time compiler. The person who built the first working prototype, spent years on failed experiments before it, and quietly shipped it to every Erlang and Elixir system on the planet is Lukas Backström — OTP team member since 2009, Francesco Cesarini's former student, and one of the most consequential engineers in the ecosys...

Joe Armstrong once said anyone can write a type system covering 90% of Erlang — it's the remaining 10% that defeats even the brightest minds in computer science. He was referring to Philip Wadler. That was 1995. Thirty years later, the BEAM is finally converging on an answer. In this episode, Alan Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with Annette Bieniusa, professor of software technology at R...

Three engineers. Three different virtual machines. One conversation that started with the JAM and ends with the JIT compiler. Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down again with Björn Gustafsson — member of the OTP team since 1996, and the person who has personally shepherded the BEAM through every major transition since taking it over from Bogdan Wódzicki — for a deep dive into 30 years of runt...

There's a gap between BlueSky's open reference implementation (handles a few hundred thousand users) and BlueSky's own production system (handles millions, but runs on infrastructure most teams can't replicate). Chris Beck and his team at Bitcrowd set out to close it -and ended up somewhere they didn't expect. In this episode, Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini talk to Chris Bec...

Every player is a process. Every monster is a process. Every zone is a process. Sound familiar? In this episode, Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with Ellyse Cedeno - technology and product leader with 25+ years across online games, distributed systems, and real-time platforms - to explore why the BEAM and the actor model are a natural fit for multiplayer game servers, and why the games...

The dashboards are green. PRs are shipping faster than ever. So why are seniors quietly burning out — and juniors not actually learning? In this episode, Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down in person with Bruce Tate — author of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, co-author of 10+ books on Elixir, and founder of Groxio — who just shut down a 10-year mentoring organization because the junior deve...

The BEAM ecosystem spent decades flying under the radar - too niche to attract serious attackers. That era is over. In this episode, we sit down with Peter Ullrich, the developer who ran a $10 experiment at ElixirConf EU in Málaga and discovered a vulnerability that could crash the BEAM with a 13-character string - with zero prior security experience. Then we hear from Jonathan Machen, CISO of the...

For the first time in over a decade, the Erlang runtime is gaining a new native data type — and on this episode of BEAM There, Done That, hosts Francesco Cesarini and Allan Wyma sit down with Björn Gustavsson, known by many as the “B” in BEAM. Björn takes listeners deep into the history of records, maps, tag bits, and the architectural trade-offs that shaped the Erlang runtime from the 1990s to to...

Three and a half years, one book, and a clearer answer to what Phoenix is actually doing under the hood. Phoenix makes building web apps in Elixir feel effortless, but how much of that is genuine elegance and how much is metaprogramming hiding the complexity? Adi Iyengar spent three and a half years writing Build Your Own Web Framework in Elixir to find out, and in this episode he sits down with F...

In this episode of BEAM There, Done That, hosts explore what really happens when the high-level concurrency and fault-tolerance of Elixir meet the low-level performance and control of Rust. The conversation dives into interoperability patterns—NIFs, ports, and emerging tooling—and where each language shines when building real-world systems that need both resilience and raw speed. Joining the discu...

In this episode of BEAM There, Done That, hosts Francesco Cesarini and Allen Wyma sit down with Chris McCord, the creator of the Phoenix Framework, for a deep dive into the evolving world of Elixir, distributed systems, and durable processes on the BEAM. Fresh from ElixirConf EU, Chris shares the story behind his latest work on durable servers—a powerful abstraction that brings persistence, global...

In this episode of BEAM There, Done That, co-hosts Francesco Cesarini and Allen Wyma sit down with Dave Lucia, co-founder and CTO of TV Labs, and Paulo Valente, AI specialist and maintainer of Nx. The conversation explores a novel and compelling use case of Elixir, Luerl, and the BEAM. It’s a deep dive into how TV Labs operates a hardware-as-a-service platform, enabling clients to test and optimiz...

The Code is the Instrument: Sam Aaron on the Why of the Sonic Pi

Erlang was designed for reliability in telephone switches, but its core principles — isolated processes, message passing, “let it crash supervision — anticipated problems we’re only now grappling with at scale. Four decades later, these ideas are finding new expression in local-first software: apps that work offline, sync peer-to-peer, and put users back in control of their data. In this podcast,...

We catch up with Kimutai Kiprotich about using Elixir and the BEAM to build AI Agents.

We catch up with  @zach_daniel  about  @ashframework  .

We catch up with Jose Valim and talk about the future of #Elixir and how #Elixir #agent #ai #coding

Paulo Valente comes onto the show to discuss #elixir 's #nx library and the state of #machinelearning in #elixir

Francesco, Allen, and Andrea Leopardi discuss concurrency, OTP, and the evolution of the BEAM.