Why I Wrote the Beam Book

a year ago

The author wrote 'The BEAM Book' after a decade of maintaining Klarna’s core system, where a 15-millisecond pause in the BEAM could cause major disruptions.
The project started in 2012 with optimism but faced challenges, including switching tools (DocBook to AsciiDoc) and dealing with publishing issues with O’Reilly and Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Community feedback and open-sourcing the project on GitHub in 2017 provided motivation and improvements from contributors.
The book covers essential BEAM topics like schedulers, garbage collection, memory management, and performance tuning for Erlang/Elixir systems.
Lessons learned include persistence over perfection, the importance of boundaries, and the value of community involvement.
The book is now available in paperback on Amazon, and the author encourages contributions via GitHub and offers workshops on BEAM internals.

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