February 17, 2026

The Soul of Erlang and Elixir

talk

Sasa Juric / GOTO Conferences · 2019

  • Live-demos the exact properties agents need: process isolation, preemptive scheduling, and supervision — showing a spinning computation that cannot block or crash its neighbors
  • Demonstrates shelling into a running BEAM node to inspect and manipulate processes, the kind of runtime observability that agent governance frameworks are trying to build from scratch
  • Makes “let it crash” visceral — supervisors restart failed processes automatically, which is precisely the graduated containment that multi-agent safety papers prescribe
February 11, 2026

Erlang: The Movie (1990)

talk

YouTube / Ericsson · 1990

  • Ericsson’s original promotional video for Erlang, demonstrating live telephony system upgrades without dropping calls
  • Shows hot code swapping in action — a running telecom switch is updated mid-call, seamlessly transferring to new modules
  • A time capsule of the problems that shaped BEAM’s design: five-nines uptime, concurrent call handling, and zero-downtime deployments