Erlang Skills

What is Erlang?

Erlang is a functional, concurrent language developer at Ericsson in the 1980s for telephony applications. Erlang has survived over the years due to its high availability, fault tolerance, hot-swappability, and it’s ability to run on many platforms. It has especially seen a recent surge thanks to the Elixir programming language which runs on the Erlang VM.

What to use Erlang for

• Telecommunications Systems: Erlang is widely used in the telecommunications industry for building telecom infrastructure, including telephony switches, call control systems, and messaging platforms, where high availability and fault tolerance are critical.
• Real-Time Messaging Systems: Erlang is well-suited for building real-time messaging systems, chat applications, and collaboration platforms, thanks to its lightweight processes, efficient message passing, and built-in support for concurrency and distribution.
• Distributed Systems: Erlang excels at building distributed systems, enabling developers to create fault-tolerant and scalable distributed applications, distributed databases, and distributed message queues.
• Soft Real-Time Systems: Erlang is suitable for building soft real-time systems, such as gaming servers, financial trading platforms, and IoT applications, where timely response and high availability are essential, but strict timing constraints are less critical.
• Highly Concurrent Applications: Erlang is ideal for building highly concurrent applications that need to handle large numbers of simultaneous connections and concurrent tasks, such as web servers, streaming media platforms, and online gaming services.

What is an Erlang developer?

• Concurrency Specialist: An Erlang developer is a concurrency specialist who specializes in building highly concurrent and fault-tolerant systems using Erlang.
• Proficient in Erlang: An Erlang developer is proficient in the Erlang programming language, including its syntax, concurrency primitives, OTP (Open Telecom Platform) framework, and built-in libraries for distributed computing.
• Understanding of Distributed Systems: An Erlang developer has a deep understanding of distributed systems concepts and techniques, including distributed computing, message passing, fault tolerance, and eventual consistency.
• Problem-Solving Skills: An Erlang developer possesses strong problem-solving skills and can design and implement scalable and fault-tolerant solutions to complex distributed systems problems, such as load balancing, failover, and distributed consensus.
• Collaborative Team Player: An Erlang developer collaborates effectively with other developers, system administrators, and stakeholders to design, implement, deploy, and maintain Erlang-based systems, ensuring smooth operation and continuous improvement.

Most important Erlang developer skills in 2024

• Concurrency and Parallelism: Mastery of concurrency and parallelism concepts in Erlang, including lightweight processes, message passing, supervision trees, and OTP behaviors, enabling developers to build scalable and fault-tolerant systems.
• Fault Tolerance and Resilience: Understanding of fault tolerance mechanisms in Erlang, including process isolation, supervision trees, hot code swapping, and error recovery strategies, ensuring high availability and system resilience in the face of failures.
• Distributed Computing: Proficiency in distributed computing techniques in Erlang, including distributed message passing, distributed data storage, eventual consistency, and distributed system design patterns, enabling developers to build scalable and fault-tolerant distributed applications.
• Functional Programming: Familiarity with functional programming principles in Erlang, including immutable data structures, higher-order functions, pattern matching, and recursion, enabling developers to write clean, expressive, and maintainable code.
• Performance Optimization: Knowledge of performance optimization techniques in Erlang, including process scheduling, memory management, code profiling, and system tuning, ensuring optimal performance and resource utilization in Erlang-based systems.

Erlang resources

Check out our resources to continue sharpening your Erlang skills.

Hired profiles help developers showcase their top tech skills

After passing Hired skills assessments, candidates have the chance to showcase their skills to employers. They can opt to present an ‘Assessments’ badge on their profile. Candidates may take various assessments including Programming Skills, Full Stack, Backend, Frontend, iOS, Android, Debugging, Dev Ops Generalist, and Dev Ops AWS.

Why should you hire Erlang developers?

• Telecom Expertise: Erlang developers bring expertise in telecom systems development, enabling you to build high-performance and fault-tolerant telecom infrastructure and real-time communication platforms that meet the demanding requirements of the telecommunications industry.
• Concurrency and Scalability: Erlang developers enable you to build highly concurrent and scalable systems that can handle massive numbers of simultaneous connections and concurrent tasks, thanks to Erlang’s lightweight processes, efficient message passing, and built-in support for concurrency and distribution.
• Fault Tolerance and Resilience: Erlang developers enable you to build fault-tolerant and resilient systems that can recover gracefully from failures and continue to operate reliably under adverse conditions, ensuring high availability and system uptime.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Erlang developers bring expertise in distributed systems design and implementation, enabling you to build scalable and fault-tolerant distributed applications that can operate effectively in distributed environments and handle complex distributed computing challenges.

Assess tech candidates for Erlang skills

Looking for candidates skilled in Erlang? Technical assessments are a multi-pronged solution. They allow you to streamline the hiring process and reduce bias with tech skill-focused benchmarks. 

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