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PODCAST

BEAM There, Done That

BEAM There, Done That is a podcast about building real systems with Elixir, Erlang, and the BEAM. We’ve built it before — distributed systems, fault‑tolerant services, event pipelines, real‑time apps, production nightmares, and the supervision trees that saved them. Each episode dives into practical lessons from shipping software on the BEAM: architecture decisions, scaling challenges, operational failures, and the patterns that actually work. No hype. No theory without scars. Just hard‑won

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All Episodes

01:02:38

Alex Koutmos on Elixir for Finance, Trading & Blockchain

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/10/02

Brex runs on Elixir. Klarna runs on Erlang. Mastercard is believed to use it. And most of the community that builds on these systems watches them with PromEx - a library written by today's guest.Alex Koutmos has been in the Elixir ecosystem for over a decade. He wrote PromEx - the Prometheus metrics library most of this audience runs in production - and he's just written Elixir for Finance with his brother Dimitrios, a tenured finance professor at Texas A&M. The book takes Livebook,

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01:09:22

Kip Cole on Time, Localization and Building Agenda

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/09/25

The Navajo Nation inside Arizona observes daylight saving. The Hopi reservation inside the Navajo Nation skips it again. There's a corner of the Yucatan Peninsula that takes 20 minutes to drive through and costs you an hour on your sat nav. No compiler warns you about any of this.Kip Cole has spent 10 years building the Elixir libraries that handle what software gets wrong about human reality: localization, time, and scheduling. CLDR/ex_cldr gave the ecosystem 173,000 Unicode characters and

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01:11:02

Is Your Elixir Code Actually Fast? Tobias Pfeiffer on...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/09/18

Everyone has an opinion about whether the BEAM is fast or slow. Almost nobody has actually measured it properly.Tobias Pfeiffer -PragTob on the internet, benchmarking nerd, real-time engineer at Supabase -came to Elixir from Ruby because Ruby couldn't handle WebSockets at scale. Then he learned the language the way he learns every language: by building a benchmarking library. Ten years later, Benchee is what most of the Erlang and Elixir world reaches for when it wants a number instead of an

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01:11:35

Louis Pilfold on Building Gleam - Static Types on the...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/09/11

What if the BEAM had a language that felt like talking to a friend instead of fighting a compiler?That's the problem Louis Pilfold set out to solve. He loved the BEAM. He missed static types. Every other option was a tradeoff he couldn't live with. So he built Gleam - and after years of quietly saying no to everything he wasn't sure about, it's gathered a community, found production users, and now runs on servers, browsers, and $2 microcontrollers.Topics include:why every successful

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00:36:41

How WhatsApp Fixed Erlang's Tooling Problem | Roberto...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/09/04

Part one established that Erlang scales. Part two is about what comes after - keeping a codebase that large healthy for years, when most engineers arrive having never written Erlang before.WhatsApp's answer was to invest in the language itself. The formatter, the language server, the type checker. And then to open source almost all of it back to the community - not as charity, but because diverse use cases and external bug reports make the tools better.Roberto Aloi and Michał Muskała are back

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00:34:59

Inside WhatsApp with Roberto Aloi & Michał Muskała

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/08/28

Everyone quotes WhatsApp when the topic of Erlang and scale comes up. Fewer people know what it actually looks like from the inside - what was hard, what was never hard, and what the team spent their time on once the concurrency stopped being the problem.Roberto Aloi and Michał Muskała work on the team keeping it running. This is the first of two episodes with them.Topics include:what Roberto's first Erlang moment was - implementing a GenServer for a robot at university and learning binary

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00:54:38

Erlang on a Microcontroller: Davide Bettio & Paul...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/08/21

In 1952, Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon built a box with a single switch. When you flip it, the only thing it does is reach out and switch itself back off. Seventy years later, 5,000 of those boxes are sitting on desks worldwide — and the thing making them tick is Erlang, running on a chip smaller than a fingernail.Davide Bettio built AtomVM, the virtual machine that makes this possible. Paul Guyot wrote the Erlang firmware, added SMP support as a weekend project, and shipped 5,000 units.Topics

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01:19:41

Mat Trudel on Building Bandit - the Web Server...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/08/14

Bandit quietly became the default web server in Phoenix. Mat Trudel wrote it by hand, in pure Elixir, as a side project - and kept it that way even as AI changed how everyone else writes code.This episode goes two places at once: the engineering of a foundational piece of infrastructure most developers never think about, and an honest conversation about what it means to keep building something by hand when you don't have to.Topics include:how a six-month debugging session - Wireshark, a 30-page

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01:03:08

Erlang Without an OS: Maxim Kharchenko on Building LING

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/08/07

Booting OTP without a Linux kernel underneath it. Running Erlang directly on a Xen hypervisor. Implementing a VM where every single out-of-memory condition is explicitly handled — not a single allocation without a recovery path.Maxim Kharchenko spent five to eight years building Ling, a from-scratch Erlang runtime that runs without an operating system. Not a fork of the BEAM. Not a modification. A clean implementation, built to answer one question: can you run a system that never stops?Francesco

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00:42:20

Mike Williams & Björn Gustavsson on Building the JAM

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/07/31

Before the BEAM, there was the JAM - Joe's Abstract Machine. It was the first virtual machine that made Erlang fast enough to run in production, and it was built by a handful of people at Ericsson's computer science lab who had a mandate to do whatever they wanted.Mike Williams wrote large parts of the emulator. Björn Gustavsson inherited it in 1996 and built what came after. In this episode - the most historically significant we've recorded - Alan Wyma and Francesco Cesarini bring them

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00:45:22

Elixir in the Browser: Bart Blast on Hologram

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/07/24

What if instead of making your server smarter to handle the browser, you just ran your Elixir in the browser instead?That's the bet Bart Blast has been making for six years - three of them full time. Hologram is a full-stack web framework that compiles Elixir to JavaScript and rebuilds the Erlang runtime in the browser: pattern matching engine, OTP guarantees, boxed types, all of it. No JavaScript to write. No round trip on every interaction. No inconsistent state between client and server.This is

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01:02:40

Zig Meets the BEAM: Garrison Hinson-Hasty & Isaac...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/07/17

Everyone who's ever written a C NIF for the BEAM knows the story. You have a bottleneck, you reach for native code, it works - until one day it doesn't, and instead of a process crashing, the whole node goes down. A segfault in a NIF takes the entire BEAM with it, bypassing every fault-tolerance guarantee OTP was designed to provide.This episode asks a simple question: do we have to accept that? The answer, increasingly, is no.Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with Garrison

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01:01:21

Inside the BEAM JIT: How Lukas Backström Made Erlang...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/07/10

In 2021, Erlang got something it had been promised for years: a Just-In-Time compiler. The person who built the first working prototype, spent years on failed experiments before it, and quietly shipped it to every Erlang and Elixir system on the planet is Lukas Backström — OTP team member since 2009, Francesco Cesarini's former student, and one of the most consequential engineers in the ecosystem that most people have never heard of.In this episode, Alan Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with

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01:03:00

Static Types Finally Come to the BEAM | Annette...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/07/03

Joe Armstrong once said anyone can write a type system covering 90% of Erlang — it's the remaining 10% that defeats even the brightest minds in computer science. He was referring to Philip Wadler. That was 1995. Thirty years later, the BEAM is finally converging on an answer.In this episode, Alan Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with Annette Bieniusa, professor of software technology at RPTU Germany, and Guillaume Dubois, PhD from IRIF Paris now at Dashbit, to dig into what it actually takes

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00:53:15

30 Years Inside the BEAM: Björn Gustafsson on...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/06/26

Three engineers. Three different virtual machines. One conversation that started with the JAM and ends with the JIT compiler.Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down again with Björn Gustafsson — member of the OTP team since 1996, and the person who has personally shepherded the BEAM through every major transition since taking it over from Bogdan Wódzicki — for a deep dive into 30 years of runtime engineering.Topics include:the three competing virtual machines built in parallel at Ericsson's

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00:40:48

Why Elixir Beat Go and Rust for BlueSky's Data Plane...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/06/19

There's a gap between BlueSky's open reference implementation (handles a few hundred thousand users) and BlueSky's own production system (handles millions, but runs on infrastructure most teams can't replicate). Chris Beck and his team at Bitcrowd set out to close it -and ended up somewhere they didn't expect.In this episode, Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini talk to Chris Beck, founder of Bitcrowd in Berlin, about building an open source alternative to BlueSky's data plane

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01:06:42

Why Multiplayer Games Are Just Distributed Systems |...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/06/12

Every player is a process. Every monster is a process. Every zone is a process. Sound familiar?In this episode, Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down with Ellyse Cedeno - technology and product leader with 25+ years across online games, distributed systems, and real-time platforms - to explore why the BEAM and the actor model are a natural fit for multiplayer game servers, and why the games industry keeps learning this the hard way.Topics include:why MMORPGs and telecom systems have more in

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01:06:47

Who Builds the Next Generation of Senior Devs? Bruce...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/06/05

The dashboards are green. PRs are shipping faster than ever. So why are seniors quietly burning out — and juniors not actually learning?In this episode, Allen Wyma and Francesco Cesarini sit down in person with Bruce Tate — author of Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, co-author of 10+ books on Elixir, and founder of Groxio — who just shut down a 10-year mentoring organization because the junior developer career path had become too unclear to sustain.Topics include:why AI has broken the traditional

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01:02:29

AI Found 5 CVEs in One Afternoon — The BEAM Security...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/05/29

The BEAM ecosystem spent decades flying under the radar - too niche to attract serious attackers. That era is over.In this episode, we sit down with Peter Ullrich, the developer who ran a $10 experiment at ElixirConf EU in Málaga and discovered a vulnerability that could crash the BEAM with a 13-character string - with zero prior security experience. Then we hear from Jonathan Machen, CISO of the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, whose job is to catch and coordinate everything Peter finds.We cover:How

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00:54:45

Inside the BEAM: Björn Gustavsson on Maps, Records,...

BEAM There, Done That ·

2026/05/22

For the first time in over a decade, the Erlang runtime is gaining a new native data type — and on this episode of BEAM There, Done That, hosts Francesco Cesarini and Allan Wyma sit down with Björn Gustavsson, known by many as the “B” in BEAM. Björn takes listeners deep into the history of records, maps, tag bits, and the architectural trade-offs that shaped the Erlang runtime from the 1990s to today. The discussion explores why records were originally implemented as a hack, why maps never fully

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