Hello and welcome to another “This week in Erlang” newsletter! We have a lot to share this week. But, first, I’d like to thank Mark Allen (@bytemeorg) for volunteering to take over the newsletter while I’m gone.

Community Announcement

Mariano Guerra released the first ever “State of BEAM” survey last week, I wanted to remind you all again to fill it if you have forgotten or share it with your network.

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

Articles and Blog posts

• Mariano (@warianoguerra) wrote an article on public/private keys and how to handle them in Erlang: http://marianoguerra.org/posts/publicprivate-key-encryption-sign-and-verification-in-erlang/

• @zxq9 wrote an article on how you can convert strings to Erlang terms: http://zxq9.com/archives/1354

• Sargun Dhillon (@sargun) did a piece on concurrency concerns with Go and compared them to Erlang: https://medium.com/@sargun/go-concurrency-considered-harmful-26499a422830

• Oleksandr Kaleniuk (@okaleniuk) wrote an article on Hackermoon with the title “Why Erlang is the only true computer language”. Interesting stuff: https://hackernoon.com/why-is-erlang-the-only-true-computer-language-4c7d1f195a02

• Namdak Tonpa (@5ht) wrote about his experiences with different message platforms here: https://medium.com/@5ht/connectivity-in-the-palm-ec269be4aeb3

• RabbitMQ team is working on a new release and they wrote something to show us how it can be deployed on Kube: https://github.com/rabbitmq/rabbitmq-peer-discovery-k8s/tree/master/examples/k8s_statefulsets

Library updates

• Not really a library update, but library related :) If you like Cowboy and use it you can send some donations to @lhoguin to thank him: https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/ninenines

OTP Updates

• A very old, but interesting PR got merged into OTP master this week. This PR by José Valim (@josevalim) adds a new return type for gen_server callbacks. Namely, {continue, term()}. Read the PR and get ready for OTP 20.1! https://github.com/erlang/otp/pull/1490

• Björn and Lukas keep working on extremely exciting performance updates.

Library of the week

istype a library by, Charles Zilm (@Projectgoldfish), that allows for runtime type checking in your Erlang code. It achieves this by using parse transforms and saves a lot of hassle. Take a look:

https://github.com/aufishgrp/istype

Project of the week

Rabl is a new project, by Russell Brown (@russelldb), that is using the Riak components to build a “replicated, distributed database that runs as a cluster”. It is definitely and interesting project and has a lot of potential. Take a look here:

https://github.com/nhs-riak/rabl

Thanks to @bytemeorg for the suggestion.

Announcements

• Some people asked for a mailing list, so I’ve created one that you can signup to here: http://eepurl.com/c2xmWr . This means starting next week you will get an Email every Friday with this newsletter in it!

• If you didn’t know there is an Atom feed of this newsletter here: https://gootik.github.io/this-week-in-erlang/feed.xml

• Again, thanks to @bytemeorg for picking up my slack for the next few weeks.