AdRoll Group and The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation
Written by , July 31, 2019 We recently decided to sponsor the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation. We believe this is a very important initiative and we’re trying to contribute with it as much as we can. Learn more about it, the reasons behind our sponsorship, and the other ways in which we’re contributing in this article.
5-7 minute read
What’s The EEF?
Paraphrasing from their own website…
The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation is a new non-profit organization dedicated to furthering the state of the art for Erlang, Elixir, LFE, and other technologies based on the BEAM. Their goal is to increase the adoption of this sophisticated platform among forward-thinking organizations. With member-supported Working Groups actively contributing to libraries, tools, and documentation used regularly by individuals and companies relying on the stability and versatility of the ecosystem, they actively invest in critical pieces of technical infrastructure to support their users in their efforts to build the next generation of advanced, reliable, realtime applications.
The community behind Erlang, Elixir, etc. is not new and during its many years it has experienced multiple diverse phases and has grown with the help from many independent contributors. One of the goals behind the EEF is to unite these independent contributions, give them the support that they deserve and help everyone involved to get the best from them.
These are the very first days of the Foundation, but they already have many working groups covering a variety of very intersting ideas:
- Building and Packaging: Their mission is to evolve the tools in the ecosystem related to building and deploying code, with a strong focus on interoperability between BEAM languages
- Observability: Their goal is to evolve the tools in the ecosystem related to observability, such as metrics, distributed tracing and logging, with a strong focus on interoperability between BEAM languages.
- Security: They will work on identifying security issues, and providing solutions, developing guidance, standards, technical mechanisms and documentation.
- Education, Training & adoption: The objective of this working group is to facilitate, evolve education and training and consolidate educational material(s) for all BEAM languages and the BEAM itself.
- Documentation: They will work to improve the accessibility, interoperability and quality of the documentation across projects and languages in the Erlang Ecosystem.
- Fellowship: This is a group created to formally nominate community members for a fellowship role according to the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation bylaws.
- Sponsorship: This group function is to approve sponsors candidacy.
- Marketing: To expand awareness of Erlang Ecosystem and participation in its community. To promote the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation and its activities, and to increase engagement in the foundation.
Why do we care?
As you might have seen in some previous entries in this blog, some of our core systems (like our real-time bidding platform) are fully powered by Erlang. And while we have a team of amazing developers, we don’t build everything from scratch. We invest deeply and depend heavily on the open-source libraries and tools that power up our infrastructure. Maintaining and improving those projects is a big challenge for their contributors, with many of them not being backed up by any company big or small. We believe that the EEF can help on the area a lot.
On a related subject, we know that these languages even when not esoteric are not as popular as many others. Keeping a reasonable offer of developers that are capable of and willing to satisfy the increasing demand is not easy. We believe that the foundation will have a profound impact on this area. We are also always looking for our devs to grow professionally. With the help of the different working groups within the EEF, we believe that this will be much easier. The Foundation will allow our devs to learn new skills, use better tools, standarize their best practices, contribute to the community and more.
In general, we believe that the EEF will bring a very positive influx of energy to an already energetic and growing ecosystem of which we’re part of.
Contributing with the EEF
AdRoll is a founding member of the EEF, we were there supporting it since its inception through the Erlang Industrial User Group.
Miriam Pena, staff engineer at AdRoll, helped define the bylaws and working groups, worked on the paperwork, marketing, presented the foundation in diverse places, and much more. Miriam is at this stage a board member for the EEF and she is also participating in the sponsorship, marketing, fellowship and education working groups.
Besides her, some of our most talented engineers are also members of various working groups. For instance, Brujo Benavides is a member of the Education, Training & Adoption group.
The EEF has a fairly simple membership program that includes 3 options:
- Basic Membership: You’re entitled to attend meetings but not to vote on any resolutions.
- Annual Supporting Membership: Supporting Members may attend meetings and cast votes on resolutions. Your commitment also supports Foundation activities, such as Working Groups and community events.
- Lifetime Supporting Membership: All the benefits of an Annual Supporting Membership at a reduced rate! This level demonstrates your alignment with our vision of the Erlang Ecosystem as the primary technology of the future.
You can become a member by signing in at their website.
This initiative can be an amazing thing for all the people that love these languages and this wonderful community. But that will only happen if we all take part of it.
So, what are you waiting for? Become a member today!