Startup School

I attended startup school on Saturday. It was a great experience and a rare opportunity to hear to a such impressive speakers share their wisdom about technology and entrepreneurship. Some of my favorite talks were by David Heinemeier Hansson, Greg McAdoo, Marc Andreesen, Paul Buchheit and Michael Arrington. I met a bunch of programmers and entrepreneurs and I also chatted briefly with DHH about 37signals and Peter Norvig about new search startups and their chances of competing with Google. Many thanks to YCombinator for organizing such a great event!

If you haven't attended, you can see all the videos here. Highly recommended.

Concurrency and expressiveness

Damien Katz's article Lisp as Blub has sparked a lively debate on Hacker News on the relative merits of Erlang and other languages for building robust applications. Good points were made on all sides (except for the tired complaints about Erlang syntax -- I have a suspicion that most people who complain about it haven't done much coding in Erlang). Unfortunately, I think that a key point was lost in all the noise: all else being equal, a language with great support for concurrency and fault tolerance has a higher expressive power than a language that doesn't. It just lets you build concurrent applications much more easily (less code, fewer bugs, better scalability, yadda yadda).

EC2 gets persistent block level storage

I just caught Amazon's announcement of the new persistent storage engine for EC2. This is great stuff. It lets you create persistent block level storage devices ranging from 1GB to 1TB in size and attach them to EC2 instances in predetermined availability zones. This service complements Amazon's other storage services -- EC2 and SimpleDB -- in providing raw block-level storage devices that are persistent, fast and local (so you don't have to worry about SimpleDB's eventual consistency issues). You can use these volumes for anything -- running a traditional DBMS (MySQL, Postgres) is the first thing that comes to mind.

This announcement is a departure from Amazon's tradition of announcing services only once they become available. It looks like Amazon is feeling the heat of competition from Google App Engine and is becoming more open to win over the hearts and minds of developers who are drawn to GAE for its auto-magical scalability. The ability to attach multiple terabyte-sized volumes on demand alleviates some of those concerns when deploying on Amazon's infrastructure. I'm sure it won't be long before someone creates an open source BigTable-like solution for applications that need massive scalability and redundancy on top of multiple persistent storage volumes (I think this would be a great application to write in Erlang, but I don't know how well Erlang performs in applications that require heavy disc IO).

I like what Amazon is doing. By providing the basic building blocks for scalable applications, its enables startups to create their own GAE competitors (Heroku is the first one that comes to mind) on top of Amazon's infrastructure. Smart move.

Google has the advantage of being able to provide APIs for tight integration with other Google services such as authentication and search (the latter is hypothetical as of now). We'll see how strongly this plays in Google's favor in the coming months.

Of course, price is still a question mark. Neither Amazon's persistent storage service nor GAE have had their prices announced.

Another missing detail is the Amazon store service's reliability. If a disc fails, do you lose your data? What's the failure probability? Etc.

All this is great for developers. Competition between Amazon and Google means developers will enjoy more services and for lower prices in the coming years.

Tag cloud in ErlyWeb howto

Nick Gerakines wrote a good tutorial on how to make tag clouds in ErlyWeb. Check it out at http://blog.socklabs.com/2008/04/tag_clouds_in_erlang_with_erly/.

ErlyWeb renamed "Erlang on Rails"

Erlang is *almost* a tipping point. Thanks to reddit, many people are interested in it. However, it's not there yet. Despite being the only language that got concurrency right, and all its other standout features, many developers still use other languages. The only explanation I can think of is that Erlang hasn't had much PR over the years (the Erlang movie nonwithstanding). I'm confident that a good PR boost will help push Erlang over the hill. Unfortunately, Ericsson doesn't seem interested in heavily promoting Erlang the way Microsoft promotes .NET and Sun promotes Java (this may be because many Ericsson employees have never heard of Erlang). So, I decided to take things into my own hands. I don't have a budget, so I need to get creative. The best way to succeed if you're small is to ride a big wave -- and what's a better wave to ride than Ruby on Rails?

Ruby on Rails is very popular -- much more than ErlyWeb. I believe this popularity is due to the "on Rails" meme, which is just bursting with positive connotations. It sounds young, fresh, happy. It's the anti-enterprisy software. It emancipates you from burdensome type systems, explicit getters and setters, and (ugh) XML. Its metaprogramming wizardry is made of bliss. Its evokes images of riding in environmentally-friendly transportation looking out the window at grassy meadows, rolling hills and sunny skies.

I think that renaming ErlyWeb to "Erlang on Rails" will help win over the hearts and minds of many programmers who are currently on the fence. They may be curious about Erlang but are turned off by its telcom image. "Erlang on Rails" conveys a more balanced feeling of industrial strength applications from the telcom world mixed with the social Web 2.0 era of interconnectedness that celebrates the rise of individualism over grey corporate culture.

2008 will be the year of Erlang on Rails. I know it.

Update: This was an April Fool's joke, in case it's not obvious anymore :)