EEF Newsletter #1

In This Newsletter

Expect the EEF newsletter the first Friday of each month. In this newsletter, we will cover a new feature called Working Group Water Cooler where we interview a representative from one of the working groups. We hope this provides insight into what the working groups are doing, and provide a clear path for interested parties to reach out and to help. This time we are discussing the Observability working group with its chair, Tristan Sloughter.

A new working group - Education, Training & Adoption - has been formed. Check out the details below.

We have a sponsor testimonial from Francesco Cesarini explaining his support for the EEF as well his aspirations for it. If sponsorship interests you, now is the time to get on board as a founding sponsor. Finally, we wrap up with some ecosystem news.

Don’t forget to check out the Elixir Fountain podcast with board members Alistair Woodman and Miriam Pena!

Working Group Water Cooler

Name and Role in the Working Group Tristan Sloughter. I’m the chair of the working group.

What is the primary goal of the working group? Describe in reference to the community benefits. The primary goal is to improve the observability offerings on the BEAM, particularly integration with modern offerings — Zipkin, Jaeger, DataDog, Prometheus, Honeycomb, LightStep, Stackdriver and many more — without vendor lock in, and to do it jointly across the languages on BEAM so we all benefit.

How does the group determine what to focus on? Is there a way for the community to collaborate? We have monthly meetings to discuss priorities and action items. You can find the minutes for these meetings in this google document .

Outside of the monthly meeting we use a for collaboration.

What is the group currently focused on? Are there initiatives planned? The main focus of our work in our first couple meetings has been around getting a sense of the existing landscape and how components can best work together. Some examples are how best to track context of an ongoing trace and integrating solutions like OpenCensus with the Telemetry project.

Have long term initiatives been discussed? Describe based on priority and benefit. Long term we want to have a solid shared base for tracing, metrics and logs that we then help library authors instrument with so all your BEAM dependencies can seamlessly be observed together and more such instrumentation in libraries is available.

How can the community help in supporting the group? Are there projects that need contributes or collaborators?

Lots! Libraries need to be instrumented with . This project requires involvement across the ecosystem to realize the long term goal. And opencensus-beam (https://github.com/opencensus-beam/) has a lot of libraries that can use input from the community. And if you use a third party service for collecting metrics or traces that you don’t see support for that would be a welcome contribution :)

What is the best way for the community to stay informed on the working group’s initiatives? Follow along with the GitHub repo and minutes from our meetings. And drop it on Erlang slack (#eef-observability-wg) to ask us how it is going!

New Working Group: Education, Training & Adoption

The mission statement of the new working group is to “facilitate, evolve education and training and consolidate educational material(s) for all BEAM languages and the BEAM itself.” Check out the Education, Training, and Adoption working group’s full page .

Sponsor Testimonial

The Erlang Ecosystem Foundation has become the focal point of the BEAM community, bringing together developers from all over the world who share common interests. The network and outreach of the founding members is second to none, allowing contacts to be forged and work groups to be established. These work-groups, cooperating across programming languages, are what will bring the ecosystem to the next level. Erlang Solutions is proud to be part of it, because together, we are stronger!

Francesco Cesarini Founder and Technical Director

Last Chance to Become a Founding Sponsor

It’s the last chance to become a founding sponsor for the EEF. Show your support for the community, the BEAM languages, and the foundation itself by becoming a founding sponsor. Join the other great founding sponsors here .

Ecosystem News

• OTP 22 has been released with “completely re-implemented […] lower levels of the Erlang compiler” as well as experimental socket API, along with other improvements.
• Elixir 1.9 has been released with “releases support, improved configuration, and more.” Additionally, Fernando Tapia Rico has joined the Elixir core team.

See you Soon!

Stay tuned for exciting updates about the EEF and the wider Ecosystem community. The buzz is building and it’s a great time to be working with this technology. If you have any questions or things you’d like to see in this newsletter, please let us know at marketing !

Remember to follow us on Twitter for news, updates, and more throughout the month!