Erlang Masterclass: Concurrency and the OTP

Use restaurant and banquet analogies to distinguish concurrency, where multiple tasks overlap on a single or multiple cores, from parallelism, where tasks run truly simultaneously.

Explore Erlang's bang operator for inter-process communication, sending messages via a PID, handling mailboxes with receive blocks, and using after timeouts.

Execute a parallel Monte Carlo simulation by spawning processes to place random points and a collector to count points inside the circle, illustrating speedup and bottlenecks.

Explore the OTP design principles and common patterns that enable reliable Erlang servers, focusing on gen_server, supervisor, releases, and applications.

discover how the gen_server behavior implements a generic server with start, stop, call, and cast interface, plus init, handle_call, handle_cast, handle_info, and terminate callbacks.

Discover rebar3, the official unofficial Erlang build tool, and learn to compile, test, and release code, create releases, and explore the app structure.

Learn how otp supervision trees handle failures by restarting crashed workers through supervisors, enabling fault-tolerant systems and preparing you to craft a simple supervisor.

Examine how linking processes supports supervision trees, creates a chain of linked processes with spawn and link, and reveals crash propagation and process links in Erlang.