Francesco Cesarini, Founder of Erlang Solutions & author of Erlang Programming

Francesco Cesarini

Biography: Francesco Cesarini

Francesco Cesarini has used Erlang on a daily basis for over 15 years, having started his career as an intern at Ericsson’s computer science laboratory, the birthplace of Erlang. He moved on to Ericsson’s Erlang training and consulting arm working on the first release of the OTP middleware, applying it to turnkey solutions and flagship telecom applications.

In 1999, soon after Erlang was released as open source, he founded Erlang Solutions. With offices in the UK, Sweden, Poland (and soon the US), they have become the world leaders in Erlang based consulting, contracting, training, systems development and support services. In 2008, they launched the Erlang Factory conferences. At Erlang Solutions, Francesco has worked on major Erlang based projects both within and outside Ericsson, and in his current role as CSO, is setting the strategy and vision of the company while supervising the technical teams.

Francesco is active in the Erlang community not only through regularly talks, seminars and tutorials at conferences worldwide, but also through his involvement in international research projects. He organises local Erlang user groups and with the help of his colleagues, runs the trapexit Erlang community website. He is the co-author of Erlang Programming, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2009. With whatever time he has left over, he teaches Erlang to graduates and undergraduates at Oxford University and the IT University of Gothenburg. You can follow his ramblings (mainly on Erlang and Erlang Solutions) on twitter.

You can follow FrancescoC on twitter.

 

Presentation: "What they do not teach you about running a business when taking your computer science degree?"

Track: IT in the World / Time: Wednesday 16:50 - 17:50 / Location: Room 202/203

When taking a computer science degree, you learn the foundations that allow you to stay on top of technical changes. But what happens if you find yourself running a business in the open source space?

All of a sudden, cash flow, profit & loss, business plans and sales strategies overshadow technical requirements and coding.

This talk will cover lessons learnt when growing Erlang Solutions, a company focused on an open source technology from a one man band to a multinational company with 70 employees, offices in three countries and clients on five (We are still looking for clients on Antartica).

Presentation: "Erlang from behind the Trenches"

Track: Upcoming Languages / Time: Friday 15:35 - 16:35 / Location: Room 104/105

Erlang is a programming language designed for the Internet Age, although it pre-dates the Web. It is a language designed for multi-core computers, although it pre-dates them too. It is a "beacon language", to quote Haskell guru Simon Peyton-Jones, in that it more clearly than any other language demonstrates the benefits of concurrency-oriented programming.

In this talk, I will introduce Erlang from behind the trenches, looking at how its history influenced its contructs. I will be doing so from a personal prospective, with anecdotes from my time as an intern at the Ericsson computer science lab at a time when the language was being heavily influenced and later when working on the OTP R1 release.