Welcome!
rick
I guess maybe we should introduce ourselves and then perhaps plan a
meetup over food/drinks to decide on the meetings/format of the
group.
I have been professionally developing software for the last 10 years
(and another few years before that writing MUDs).
I spend most of my daylight hours at a large finance information firm
designing and writing C++. In the evenings I code in Erlang and D. I'm
still trying to find way to sneak Erlang into the firm.
I only discovered Erlang a couple months ago, but, as most people can
attest, it has inspired me to create things. I have spent most of my
life working on distributed systems, creating event driven frameworks
and trying hard to strike a balance between performance and usability.
I realized a couple months back that I was just recreating Erlang.
On to business. I like NYC-Ruby's format for meetings. They meet on
the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month at an open office setting. The
1st meeting of the month is reserved for talks that members volunteer
to do. The other is a hack-fest, in which people simply gather
together to code on whatever projects they're in to. They share
knowledge and help each other. There is also usually beer involved.
But first thing's first, we should meet and chat. Can anyone suggest a
nice location for such a thing? Preferably with access to wifi and
alcohol?
Mihai Balea
To follow in Rick's steps, here's a short introduction of myself:
I have been developing software professionally for about 12 years.
About two years ago I started looking into a better alternative to the
usual programming languages such as C/C++/Java. This was prompted by
the realization that the future will be concurrent. The fact that at
the same time I had to deal with some nasty multithreaded C/C++
codebase probably helped provide the impetus to move forward.
Anyways, I noticed that the internet was beginning to talk about this
strange language called Erlang that was supposedly good at handling
massive concurrency. Started looking into it and the rest, as they
say, is history :) I consider myself lucky enough that these days I
can work 100% in Erlang.
I am still surprised that there was no Erlang UG in the NY Metro Area.
I'd figured that, with the concentration of startups and established
financial firms, Erlang would be more prevalent. Oh well, there is
one now :)
I'm not sure what would be a good way to get us going... We should
probably start with an informal chat over beers. I'm not sufficiently
familiar with Manhattan to recommend a good joint for this purposes,
even though I commuted there for work for almost two years. I could
find something appropriate in Central NJ, but I'm aware of the
reluctance Manhattanites have about coming to the Garden State. Plus,
I believe that meeting in the city would be more accessible to wider
range of people.
So I'm open for suggestions as to time and location
Mihai
Matt Kangas
I've lived in NYC since 1997, working for a range of dot-com
companies, always on the engineering side. The most notable was Yahoo!
HotJobs. I also spent two years trying to build a "search engine for
events" firm -- I was co-founder/CTO. But we ran out of cash and
folded the firm. These days, I'm happily employed at another promising
startup.
I typically work on Linux/BSD systems, coding variously in Java/Python/
C - or sometimes Bash, PHP, Objective C, Perl, ... whatever it takes
to get the job done. I started paying attention to Erlang last year
after hearing about the CouchDB project -- which just seemed like
such an intriguing little project that I wanted to be able to hack on
it. :)
I live in Brooklyn and work in lower Manhattan (Broadway/Canal). I can
think of a few venues that may be suitable in Tribeca, Soho, and the
financial district. Maybe even something around Penn Station. Any
preference amongst those neighborhoods?
FYI: there seems to be an "ErLounge NYC" group on Meetup, with a total
of 19 members, but no meetings recently. Perhaps if we get our ball
rolling, we should reach out to these folks?
http://softwaredev.meetup.com/91/
--Matt
joshuajnoble
As my quick introduction, I was led to Erlang about a year and a half
ago from sheer curiosity and a love of programming languages and
interesting problem domains, concurrency and parallel processing being
probably the most interesting problem domain out there at the moment.
I've worked with a mishmash of web technologies over the past 7 years
and across a few different kinds of coding from frontend CSS tinkering
to, well, Ejabberd and I maintain an interest in all of them. If I
didn't have to pay the bills I'd probably spend all of my time
learning new languages and probably trying to design my own :) I live
in Brooklyn and work in Tribeca at the moment, but I have a bicycle
that I love to zip around Manhattan on, so I'd be up for meeting most
anywhere.