Nelson Vides
Self-taught programmer and core developer of MongooseIM
Nelson is a child of a multicultural journey. Born in Venezuela to a family of engineers and economists, he grew up in Spain to study pure maths in university and moved to Poland to become a self-taught programmer. After a few years as a C developer in security/telecommunication domains, he's now an Erlang enthusiast with an emphasis on performance and security, a professional in the field of instant messaging and a core developer of MongooseIM. In his free time he's a sports addict, practising yoga and callisthenics, and also a history fanboy, devouring books every night.
The Actor Model as a Load Testing Framework
Scalability under load. The holy grail of much of a developer's life is that our software survives its beginning. The system went live. Made it to production. Got its first user. But surely, the true test of good software is how it lives up to expectation over its lifetime? After all, you wouldn't say a bridge or building was successful just because the first 100 cars made it across safely. In other forms of engineering, things are load tested under demand either by weight, shocks or overload. As a software developer we should be ensuring SLAs or exploring error conditions under extreme load. But what is “load” in the context of software? And how do we test its many different definitions? In this talk, I will present a relationship made in heaven, the relationship between the actor model and the answer to these questions. I will also introduce you to a library that applies all this knowledge in a ready-to-use dependency.
OBJECIVES
To present the actor model as a model of programming, and load testing as a model of quality assurance, and how these two models of thought interrelate. There will be a lot of talk about concurrency and its relationship to software quality testing.
AUDIENCE
Backend engineers who are concerned with the behaviour of their system under a variety of load patterns (so probably all backend engineers). No specific experience needed, there’s plenty for a junior to understand and a senior to consider. No specific tech stack pre-required, the point is to reinforce the importance of load testing and lecture on how the actor model (and the BEAM) is the good fit for the job.
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