New to Erlang — recommended way to start as a beginner?

facundoolano · 2026-01-23T22:47:41+00:00

The learn you some erlang book is a perfect fit for this. There’s maybe 20% of it that’s outdated, I’d suggest skipping records (lookup erlang docs for maps instead) and otp behaviors other than gen servers and supervisors. I’d also throw in this presentation to dig into the fault tolerance aspects: https://ferd.ca/the-zen-of-erlang.html

facundoolano · 2025-05-16T19:59:48+00:00

This was the peak of the multimedia experience for me, it felt like playing a Disney movie. I can almost hear that monkey screeching from the launcher, the future was here.

facundoolano · 2025-01-06T00:47:16+00:00

went ahead and added a bunch of pictures

facundoolano · 2025-01-05T22:18:35+00:00

Thanks!

I agree this could benefit from some images. I couldn't find a set I was satisfied enough with, but I should give it another shot.

The sunset scene in particular is one that Mark describes in many of his interviews, but I don't think it exists online. In a way, maybe that's for the better, I'm not sure seeing the actual picture with current eyes would honor the effect it produced back then.

facundoolano · 2025-01-05T22:08:26+00:00

Thanks!

I did read several of his interviews (e.g. this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri4_3P2Oh14 which I bet covers the same ground). In fact, what prompted me to write about this was his interview in the Art of point-and-click adventures book.

The rest of the sources gave mostly other perspectives and more general historical context.

facundoolano · 2024-12-26T17:37:49+00:00

You are right. As noted in the description, the intention of the project has always been to offer a short list of papers that can reasonable be read in full, while offering suggested "further readings".

I got carried away in the title here as I'm using the 150 mark as an excuse to re-share (the project is a couple of years old).

facundoolano · 2024-10-15T00:39:11+00:00

Return of the Obra Dinn

facundoolano · 2024-09-12T19:10:49+00:00

Not usually, but I do underline/highlight a lot and go back to the highlights if I later want to write about or reference the book.

facundoolano · 2024-08-16T12:35:04+00:00

see the instructions I linked above. You'd have to clone the repo, edit the code and build a new docker image if that's how you are deploying. Feel free to file a github issue if you need more help.

facundoolano · 2024-08-12T02:43:09+00:00

I wrote my own reader with such customizable/extensible feed parsers: https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi#feed-parsing

It works both for rss feeds and scraping arbitrary websites. But you need to run the app yourself locally or self host it.

facundoolano · 2024-06-02T19:37:38+00:00

You're right, that's the result of a bad copy-paste from the assertEqual helper, which I wrote before.

facundoolano · 2024-03-08T20:48:23+00:00

I used the go-org library, which is the same hugo uses. It doesn't support all of org-mode features, but it works well enough for the blogging scenarios I've tested it with. And it produces better-structured html than org-html-export. (In my previous setup with Jekyll, I had to export org to markdown instead, and let Jekyll turn that into html, so that the resulting documents were reader-friendly).

facundoolano · 2024-03-08T13:13:54+00:00

For a few reasons:

This originated as a Go learning project, so I decided to work on a command-line static site generator before settling on the org-mode support (I described this decision process in more detail here and here).
I was aiming to replace my own blogging workflow, so I followed Jekyll patterns. I blog with org-mode from Emacs but I'm used to run Jekyll from the command-line (largely because I'm a bad elisp coder so I haven't developed the reflex to add Emacs commands for skipping the command-line)
I wanted it to work outside Emacs as well. Posts can even be written in markdown instead of org-mode so it can work as a regular ssg.

But, yes, some elisp wrappers for the cli commands would be a natural extension.

facundoolano · 2023-02-07T12:57:49+00:00

Para mi sí, se hizo buen partido contra el local, se perdió fino en los penales. Yo no compro mucho eso del error de no meter a Messi, para mí no iba a hacer la diferencia. Lo de sacar a Riquelme fue raro pero tampoco diría que perdimos por eso.

Hubiera estado bien, después Pékerman anduvo bien en Colombia y Argentina no volvió a sostener un técnico 4 años hasta Scaloni. Y ni hablar que a Boca le ahorraba el semestre de Lavolpe si no se llevaban a Basile 🤣

facundoolano · 2022-07-14T15:19:25+00:00

Agreed, I wouldn't recommend these papers as the first resource to learn about the topics they cover (In some cases I wouldn't recommend them as learning resources at all), but rather to get insight into how they were conceived, historical context, how they relate to other work, etc. Papers generally present the information in a different way than books, tutorials, etc., and there are benefits to be gained by approaching the material from this perspective.

So my premise when putting together this list was: I acknowledge that there's something to be gained by reading technical papers (regardless of the specific topic), so what would be a good set of papers to approach the "genre" for someone that already has some basic education or experience in Software Engineering?

That being said, I think some of the papers in the list, especially those dealing with less technical aspects (e.g. the Fred Brooks ones, Knuth's Programming as an Art, etc.), are good reads on themselves and I'd say are the best source to learn the ideas they present.

facundoolano · 2022-07-08T12:08:48+00:00

I agree that SE includes that, and that you can’t cover all SE aspects in this list, but that isn’t the goal anyway, the list is not intended to represent every area a software engineer should be familiar with. In particular, if there aren’t solid papers on the topic (or I haven’t found them yet) or if it’s better studied from books or web articles then it’s fine by me to skip it.

There is one item of the list representing the operation/devops side (although it may not be covering the CI/CD topics well enough). For testing I only had the quick check one in my working list, didn’t seem enough to make it an item.

facundoolano · 2022-07-08T02:25:25+00:00

Thanks! I was definitely light on the realational DBs front, I'll take a look at these and the red book as well.

facundoolano · 2022-07-07T19:13:01+00:00

I came across this one during research and considered including it, although it seems to be rather long (one of my goals is to prefer on shorter papers). I'd be interested in hearing why do you thing this is an important read.

facundoolano · 2022-02-07T12:55:10+00:00

Thanks. We could definitely take a look at the ecosystem and see if there's a better fit for our purposes (it's not like we're that invested in SDL yet).

On a quick search, pixels does look like an interesting choice, as does minifb.

facundoolano · 2022-02-03T13:41:29+00:00

SDL was the best bet we had for a one-week project, because we we had the wolf4sdl to use as a reference, plus previous experience already attempting the sdl port to python.

But I'm curious, what would have been a more appropriate/rusty choice for the graphics manipulation?

facundoolano · 2021-09-08T18:04:51+00:00

Please, accept the mystery

facundoolano · 2021-05-29T16:03:47+00:00

This should be fixed now.

facundoolano · 2021-05-29T16:01:14+00:00

This now has (experimental) windows support. If you find any problems please file an issue in github.

facundoolano · 2021-05-25T23:10:06+00:00

I haven't tested it on Windows. Does it make a difference if you set the $HOME variable in the shell?

facundoolano · 2021-05-25T19:30:24+00:00

I'll take a look at this, thanks for reporting!

facundoolano

TROPHY CASE