“Hands On Erlang” Recap

Hypothetical Labs - kevin - February 08, 2009

I’d like to thank Jason, Mark, Chris, Brenton, Ryan, James, and Brad for having the faith and courage to be my guinea pigs for the course. This is the first time I’ve a) taught an Erlang course and b) written this material from scratch so I was a little nervous before class started.

My nervousness quickly left as we dug into the material. The group brought a lot of interest and enthusiasm which made my job as instructor 1000% easier. I’d made the decision to do lots and lots of labs to get students coding as quickly as possible. This seemed to work well, for the most part, and helped solidify concepts for all.

On the first day we covered:

  • Review of Erlang
  • Concurrency & Message Passing
  • Distributed Erlang
  • Writing Servers
  • Using A Server Framework
  • Using gen_server
  • Using supervisors

1-3 programming labs followed each section so that should give some idea how hard the class worked.

Chris Williams’ tweet on the first day summed it up well: “hands on erlang. list comprehensions at 8am makes my brain hurt.” :)

Whew! I had originally planned to stop after gen_server but the class was eager to move on so we tackled supervisors as well. Friday evening we went out for drinks and dinner at Milltown, a very cool restaurant with a slight Belgian theme. Many strange and wonderful Belgian beers were enjoyed by all!

The focus of the second day turned to more practical topics:

  • Unit Testing w/eunit
  • Web Programming w/mochiweb
  • Getting Some REST w/webmachine
  • mnesia Overview

Energy levels were down a bit from the first day. I chalk it up to the pace of the first day and the number of beers consumed the night before. The second day went off without a hitch with the exception of some strange behavior a couple of students triggered in webmachine. I think webmachine is fussy about the formatting of POST bodies but I need to dig into the code a bit to be sure.

Here’s a couple of pictures I took on the second day as the class was working on some of the coding labs:

  

I’d like to thank Brian Russell of Carrboro Creative Coworking for providing the venue and taking care of all the little details. CCC is a great place to put on training for smaller classes and working with Brian was awesome!



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