Hello and welcome to “This week in Erlang”! This week bunch of interesting things happened, and most importantly we have our first ever community announcement! Get excited.

Community Announcement

We always want to make the BEAM community better. This requires us to know who we are, what we do, what we like and what we don’t like. Today, thanks to Mariano Guerra, we are launching the first in what hopefully becomes a yearly survey on the State of the BEAM, please fill the survey and share it widely so we get a good representation of the community:

http://bit.ly/state-of-beam-2017

Articles and Blog posts

• Mariano (@warianoguerra) has started a new series of tutorials on using riak_ensemble and Multi-Paxos protocol. Very easy to follow and full of interesting insights: http://marianoguerra.org/posts/multi-paxos-with-riak_ensemble-part-1/

• Fred Hebert (@mononcqc) has published a small guide on ways to make SSL and Erlang safer, if you are into that kind of stuff be sure to take a look: https://gist.github.com/ferd/af9abf6b3600d2d7f08dba58fdfb514a

• Kenji Rikitake (@jj1bdx) has started a discussion on how the rand module differs from OTP 19 to OTP 20, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/erlang-programming/Icw0pcIsnIY

• On 25th of August an online meeting was held to discuss the future of Riak, this document was available online by Mark Allen (@bytemeorg): https://slack-files.com/T6PE2GNC8-F6U0FEFKP-b5db1a9fcd

• Hex.pm now supports private packages, read the announcement here: https://hex.pm/blog/private-packages-and-organizations

Library updates

• Benoît Chesneau (@benoitc) has released a wrapper around the embedded DB RocksDB, it is very interesting: https://gitlab.com/barrel-db/erlang-rocksdb/blob/master/CHANGELOG

• GraphQL by @Shopgun and Jasper Andersen (@jlouis666) got some pretty sweet updates. The library now handles concurrency pretty well and as per Jasper puts it “Many other GraphQL solutions are concurrent, but few of them are truly parallel. In contrast, the Erlang implementation is :)”. Read the code and see how it is done: https://github.com/shopgun/graphql-erlang

OTP Updates

• Probably one of the most interesting things that happened on the OTP side is Lukas Larsson’s (@garazdawi) multi thread IO polling PR. His PR explains how it works and why it’s better, in good detail. have a look! https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/1552

Library of the week

This week I want to showcase a library that will blow your mind :) jsone by Takeru Ohta is a JSON decoding/encoding library that is done in pure Erlang. However, it is much faster than JSX and is almost comparable with jiffy without the NIF dangers. Takeru uses the delayed sub binary creation optimization of the BEAM VM to make this library extremely fast. Have a look and enjoy:

https://github.com/sile/jsone

Announcements

• Just to remind you, it is very important to get as many people on the community survey as possible. So, please share the survey linked at the top of the post with as many people as you can.

• I will be on vacation starting Sept 14th, and may not be able to do the weekly newsletter for a few weeks, if you would like to help me and volunteer please get in touch! Either at Erlanger Slack, @gootik on Twitter, or at our usual Github repo: https://github.com/gootik/this-week-in-erlang