ElixirConf 2015 - OTP Has Done It by Nick DeMonner

As a young community, we have to resist the urge to reinvent the wheel for foundational libraries and instead look to the battle-tested awesomeness that is OTP. When designing complex systems with many moving parts in Elixir, we should ask ourselves the following question: has OTP done this? In order to answer that question in this talk, we'll first look at the gen_fsm, gen_event, and gen_server libraries. We'll see some examples illustrating how, where, and why they should be used for building robust, fault-tolerant, and distributed systems. A broad discussion of some of the built-in database options like ETS and Mnesia will follow. We'll examine the pros and cons of each system, and take a look at some examples. Lastly, attendees will get a brief overview of OTP-style releases and how they can fit into modern deployment infrastructure.

[BillGathen]

I liked how Nick took a moment to say "this is the one we use almost all the time" in several spots (one-for-one restart strategy, gen_server): in most docs, they feel obliged to give equal treatments to all options, which makes it feel like they're equal in importance/utility. Saying "stick with this until it doesn't fit" is a great focusing tool when learning a new system, allowing me to defer learning the also-rans until later.

[yelgabs]

Would've loved to hear the questions as well.

Going through these conf videos is frustrating when the questions at the end are being cut off.

[hhaavvvvii]

This was incredibly helpful, both in general and in my specific goal of writing an OTP doc page for Elixir's API reference docs. Thanks!

[LarsBahner]

Thank you. Finally an alchymist the speaks human. Just Thank our💚