Erlang Forums 2022 Update!

Forum Announcements
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Welcome to our very first annual update everyone!

Although the forum only went live around 2 and a half months ago we’ve already got some great things to share with you :003:

In that time we’ve managed to rack up almost 400 threads and 3,600 posts! We’ve also served a very respectable 300K pages - not bad for a forum that has only been up a couple of months!

Stats like these can be useful because one of the aims of the forum is to help portray the Erlang community in the best possible light - and that includes showing it is alive and kicking. In a conversation with @jhogberg a little while ago he said there had been more posts and activity here in a week than the mailing list does in an average month. This is great and exactly what we were hoping for! The more buzz and activity we can generate here the better, because people are generally drawn to tech communities that feel fresh, vibrant and bustling with activity :048:

So if you’ve created a library and think others might be interested in it - post it on the forum! Written a blog post? Share it in our blog posts thread! Organising a conference or meet-up? Let us know all about it - and if you’re not doing any of those things you can still be a valuable contributor simply by posting in other people’s threads, welcoming newbies, or just being helpful, positive or supportive in any way you can. We all have roles to play and they’re all important - you’re important - perhaps more than you might realise. Each time you interact with someone in a positive way you are adding value to the entire community …because an active, welcoming, and supportive community is just the sort people like to join and get involved with. When we said in our launch announcement and Mission Statement that you can help inspire the next generation of Erlangers we really did mean it - you can - and we’ve certainly enjoyed seeing you do it over the last couple of months and we can’t wait to see you do more of it in future :star_struck:

With that said, and to help facilitate some of the above, let’s move on to what we’ve got in store for you this year:

2022 Giveaways!

Our giveaways are a fun way to give members useful prizes that often add value to the entire community - because more knowledge in the hands of community members can help lead to higher standards. This can equate to more libraries or tools as well as better quality answers on places like this forum. It’s a win for everyone - even when you don’t win yourself!

You can obtain an entry into the competition every week and to help spice things up, we’ll also be posting random bonus day alerts on the forum! These are normally associated with a condition (eg, post on the forum or follow our twitter account) and once the condition is met you can get that bonus entry. For those not interested in those alerts you can simply mute that thread.

We hope you like these giveaways and if you want even more chances to win, we have similar giveaways on Devtalk and the Elixir Forum too!

2022 Discounts!!

We’ve also got some super discounts lined up for you - most of these are in conjunction with Devtalk:

Members of the Month!

erlangforums-motm

We’ve been running a similar scheme on the Elixir Forum for several years now and it’s always gone down a treat - it’s a fun way to reward some of our most helpful and active members :blush: those who go above and beyond what’s expected of them and those who represent the community in the best possible light. If you add something of value to the forum then there’s a good chance you’d be a great candidate for such an award!

Since this is our first full year, we’ll be running one per month until the end of the year - and you can help people stand out. If you feel someone has gone the extra mile in helping you please be sure to like their post and if they answered your question please mark their post as the solution. While we don’t stick to any hard or fast rules we use things like this and overall activity and tone to help identify possible MOTMs - so if someone has helped you or made your day that little bit better, please be sure to ‘like’ their posts, and if they went the extra mile please also consider thanking them in the thread (while of course acknowledging everyone else who tried to help too).

Book clubs!

We have a number of books to give away as part of our book club initiative on Devtalk - and we’d love to get more Erlang book clubs and journals going! If you’ve fancied learning Erlang or reading an Erlang book but just never got around to it, or need a bit of an extra nudge, or like the sound of reading along with others, then this could be right up your street!

To begin with we’ll be focusing on PragProg books, and they currently have two Erlang books: Programming Erlang (PragProg) and Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir (PragProg).

If you’re interested in taking part please PM @AstonJ (if you can get a group of friends or colleagues to join you even better!)

New ‘How…’ section

With Erlang over 35 years old now, and unashamedly not being afraid to be different and do things its own way, there’s a very good chance people coming into the language will be curious about all sorts of things - from terminology to methodology to libraries that may even be older than some of the people wanting to use them! :sunglasses:

That’s where this section can help. If you’re familiar with Eli5 (Explain like I’m 5) then this is a little bit like that, though that’s just one aspect of the idea. Our aim is to go further than just explaining things to newbies - we’re hoping the section can serve as a great place to garner opinions on how Erlangers go about all sorts of things. If you have a curious mind or just want to reinforce or test your own knowledge and understanding about things, we think you’ll love this section!

Here are some examples of the type of threads we could use it for:

HWY Explain:
HWY Create:
HWY Tackle:
HWY Approach:
HDY… (How do you…)
HAY… (How are you…)

The first one is like Eli5, or more specifically, like our How would you explain Phoenix Contexts to a newbie? thread that we posted on the Elixir Forum a few years ago, and the others are for when you might be curious how someone might create, tackle or approach something in Erlang. Curious how people are building apps with Erlang in 2022? Or what their approach might be to microservices? Or what OTP actually is? This section is great for all of that!

With Erlang being around for so long and having powered massive systems for decades, there’s undoubtedly a huge amount of knowledge within the community - this is actually the sort of thing that helps Erlang stand out …so it’s only right we have some way to shine a light on this and help draw more people into the community in the process! :003:

While anyone can post a thread in this section we’ll also be posting seed threads in it from time to time too We know everyone is busy so please don’t feel like you have to reply to all of the threads straight away - you could just visit the section as and when you feel you have the time for it, and who knows, something interesting or fun might catch your eye! As there are often multiple ways to achieve the same result this could lead to some very interesting (and enlightening) discussions!

See the section info for details.

Mod nominations

We’ll also be running our first set of moderator nominations this year. This is where you can let us know who you think might make a good moderator. We generally opt for those who are active, helpful, and positive - but we’ll post more about this later in the year.

In Closing

The forum is off to a great start and a lot has happened in just a few months. We’ve already started to discuss things like BEAM interop, gateways into Erlang, new podcasts or interviews, proposals from the Erlang Core Team and much much more!

We’re sure that newcomers browsing the forum will see a community that is not only active and vibrant, but positive, supportive, and, just like Erlang, full of knowledge and wisdom that has stood the test of time.

What more could anyone ask for!?

Here’s to an amazing 2022 - let’s hope it’s one of the biggest and best for Erlang and the BEAM world to date! With your help, we’re sure it will be! :heart:

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