The BEAM Book
The BEAM Book is a comprehensive guide to understanding the Erlang Runtime System (ERTS), the virtual machine that powers Erlang, Elixir, and other BEAM languages. It covers process management, memory architecture, scheduling, garbage collection, and fault tolerance at the implementation level.
The book reached #1 New Release on Amazon in both the US and Sweden, was featured as #1 on Hacker News, and has over 3800 stars on GitHub. Jose Valim, the creator of Elixir, is among its sponsors.
Training
The BEAM for Developers is a hands-on course on BEAM internals with the person who wrote the book on it. The course equips intermediate Erlang, Elixir, and Gleam developers with practical, systems-level understanding of how the BEAM VM delivers scalability and fault tolerance.
Six modules cover: Thinking in Processes, Data Types and Message Costs, Memory and Garbage Collection, Scheduling and Concurrency, Debugging and Observability, and BEAM Patterns and Anti-Patterns.
Articles
- Three Decades with Erlang
- Why I Wrote the BEAM Book
- Unleashing the Power of Erlang's BEAM (Delta Exchange case study)
- Process Archetypes: The Roles in the Gnome Village
- Workers: Do One Job, Then Get Out of the Way
- Routers: Processes That Only Decide Where Stuff Goes
- Gatekeepers: The Traffic Controllers of the Gnome Village
- Observers: The Watchful Gnomes of the Village
Occasional Consulting
Erik occasionally helps teams read BEAM systems, understand runtime behavior, and make safer architecture decisions around scaling, observability, and operations.
