Functional Geekery Episode 115 - Sam Williams

In this episode I talk with Sam Williams. We talk his introduction to programming, moving to web-development with Erlang, the HydrOS project, the Archain project, and more.

Our Guest, Sam Williams

samcamwilliams on Github
@ArchainTeam on Twitter

Conference Announcements

Clojure SYNC will be taking place in New Orleans on February 15th & 16th of 2018. For more information and to register visit: http://clojuresync.com/.

LambdaDays 2018 will be taking place February 22nd and 23rd in Kraków, Poland. For more information, and to register, visit http://www.lambdadays.org/.

BOB 2018 is coming up in Berlin, Germany on February 23rd, 2018. For more information, and to register, visit http://bobkonf.de/.

:clojureD will be following BOB 2018 in Berlin, Germany on February 24th, 2018. For more information, and to register, visit http://clojured.de/.

Lambda Squared is a new conference taking place March 30th in Knoxville, Tennessee. For more information, and to register, visit https://www.lambda-squared.com/.

If you have a conference related to functional programming, contact me, and I will be happy to announce it.

Announcements

Some of you have asked how you can support Functional Geekery, in that vein,
Functional Geekery now has a Patreon Page.

If that is one of the ways you would like to show your support, you can
find out more at https://www.patreon.com/fngeekery.

Topics [@2:25]

About Sam
The University of Kent
How Sam was introduced to programming
Visual Basic
PHP
Writing a Meta-News analysis site
How Sam first came across Erlang
Exposure to Lisp and Scheme
Getting started in Erlang
Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good by Fred Herbert
Programming Erlang (2nd Edition) by Joe Armstrong
“If you want to really learn a language, you have to have some sufficiently difficult task, to make you engage with it properly”
Getting a deeper understanding of the nuances of Erlang
Building a web technology company on Erlang
Yaws
ehtml
Moving to write Erlang to run on Unikernerl as a final project
Unikernels
Xen
How a final project works
Richard Mortier
Migrating the Erlang Virtual Machine to run on bare metal
HydrOS
Distributed Operating System
What is the goal of the HydrOS project
Idea of process mobility across devices
Archain
What is a block-chain
What is Archain
How block-chain differs from Git or CRDTs
Proof-of-work
How Archain works to incentivize distribution of archive data
What kinds of information does Archain hope to Archive
Preventing the “Orwellian Memory Hole”
Internet Archive
Some of the limitations of the Internet Archive
How Erlang fits with building a block-chain
Simulating large networks
Archain as a platform for writing distributed applications
Sam’s talk at CodeMesh 2017
Code BEAM STO 2018

As always, a giant Thank You goes to David Belcher for the logo design.

Episode source