Burn Your Laurels

The BEAM has been tremendously successful for three decades and counting. It underpins a huge number of systems, served as the basis for many successful high profile projects, and seeded interest in the actor model among a huge number of programmers. To all the world, the BEAM is the absolute envy of the industry.

And yet our devices and networks are changing substantially for the first time in nearly a generation. We have new building blocks, rapidly evolving theory, and ever-shifting user expectations. Wasm, far edge, the digital commons, and trustless computing are all fundamentally changing the face of the industry. We can’t rest on our laurels: how do we rise to meet these new demands? What replaces processes when location is irrelevant? What even is a supervision tree when you don't trust the children? When is “let it crash” not enough? Can we make changes to the platform that radically simplify code for developers? How do we enable the next generation of LiveView, Nerves, and CouchDB to meet users where they are?

This talk will ask hard questions about where we are, where we’re going, and how to have the highest impact. The BEAM is a distributed systems trailblazer; we're riding a ton of momentum, and the ecosystem is a model for communities outside of our own. Let’s not stop here; the world is changing and we need a Cambrian explosion of activity and innovation to keep up with it. Let's move the needle, again!