Every forum needs an introductions thread, here’s ours 
“Hello Joe. Hello Mike. Hello Robert”
Hello World! 
Who are you and where are you from? 
30 Likes
Hello and thanks for the invitation 
I’m Rainer, coming from Switzerland, professional software developer for slightly more than 10 years.
My career started with C++, then I did some Java, and nowadays I’m using C# in my job. Some years ago I discovered Erlang through the use of RabbitMQ, and got curious about it. Ever since then, when I get to hobby programming, I’m using Elixir or Erlang, as it’s much more fun for me than what pays my bills 
Privately, I’m living in a multi-national family, my wife being Japanese, my brother-in-law American, and my grandmother was from Germany. I’ve got a 3 years old daughter, and soon there will be a second one 
Besides programming, some other interests are rc modelling, cooking and sports like kayaking or jogging.
17 Likes
Hello and thank you for inviting me.
I am Mafinar, senior Software Developer at Coffee Meets Bagel.
I like picking up languages and learning things or two from them. Only a handful sticks, Elixir is one of them. While I didn’t professionally program in Erlang as much (save a GPS Server), I have played around with it and am familiar with beam due to my Elixir experience. My day language are Python; Elixir and F# at night.
I live in Toronto, Canada. I love to cook (and eat with equal passion). Love Middle Eastern and Thai foods. Spice tolerance is off the chart. Father. Husband. Love horror movies. Assassins Creed and FarCry fan.
Glad to be here! Hopefully I will brush up my Erlang skills with y’all.
14 Likes
Hi, thank you for the invitation!
I am Arif Hussain Bangash, a geologist / geotechnical engineer turned software developer. I started learning to program during my tired nights after tiring days at the geotechnical lab or construction site.
I started with PHP and JavaScript and later learned Ruby, and Ruby on Rails from Kevin Skoglund at LinkedIn Learning (then Lynda[dot]com). My entry to BEAM languages was through Elixir. It was a language with a Ruby like syntax and best for real-time features I needed in an app I was working on. I came to Elixir for the syntax and started to love the underlying virtual machine it was running on.
To better grasp OTP, I started discovering Erlang. Contrary to the common belief that Erlang’s syntax is alien, I find it very beautiful and readable.
I hope and wish this forum turns into something as great as ElixirForum and DevTalk!
Thank you @AstonJ for creating these forums, @rvirding, Joe Armstrong and Mike Williams for creating Erlang, Jose Valim and Chris Mccord for creating the language and framework which introduced us to this platform, those who created libraries, contributed to those libraries, contributed to the docs, created code-editors’ extensions, wrote books and other learning material! Thank you all for making this community awesome! 
16 Likes
Hello!
I am Anatolii, software developer, researcher and linguist. I translate several books to Russian. I like Polish language. Hungarian too. 
I am live in Kaliningrad, Russia now and prepare to relocate to Estonia. I am e-resident of Estonia. I recently started learning Estonian.
Now I am working on the releasing of an educational project related to the possibilities of using cognitive psychology in the field of education.
I began to study Erlang under the strong positive influence of Joe Armstrong and continue to this day.
More about implemented projects and ones I was involved are here.
13 Likes
Hello everyone! I’m Louis, the Gleam person.
I’m based in London, UK, and I’m a citizen of the UK and Ireland. Looking forward to lots of BEAM chat here in the future
19 Likes
Hello, thanks for invite!
My name is Tom. I’m a bit crazy senior Elixir developer … I was born in Poland, I’m using English everyday, I’m living in Romania and it’s not all … Recently in those “dangerous times” I have relocated and created company called Ramurix Software S.R.L. in Romania without knowing literally any Romanian word.
People hearing than are not sure if I’m “brave or stupid” … I can help you guess … After I sorted out all things I took a look at last months and noticed how “brave” decisions I made. So yeah … maybe I completely look like stupid, but at least keep in mind that stupid people did not heard about Elixir over 5 years ago - hope that’s a good excuse. 
I completely fall in love with Elixir, but my heart beats everytime I read changelog of new major Erlang release. However it’s not what you think it is … I promise it’s not cheating! (written on new Erlang forum) 
Hope that my funny introduction let you relax on this beautiful Sunday afternoon so that you can start another challenging week with a banana on your face! 
12 Likes
Hey all and thanks for the invite!
While I’m not a current user of Erlang, ever since university when I first ran into the language it has been one of those languages/platforms that I think of fondly. It just felt right and fit my way of thinking about problem solving really well.
Sadly I have not yet had the opportunity to use it for work but with Elixir and Phoenix the platform is closer to my preferred domain of user interfaces and client applications.
Looking forward to see the discussions here at the forum and hope it will turn into another vibrant community!
12 Likes
Hello All! My name is John, I’m currently a web developer building a product using Elixir and Phoenix. But I love all programming languages, and learning more about erlang has definitely helped me write better Elixir. Hoping to learn more here!
13 Likes
Hello, Tom!
Nice to meet you! I am a bit crazy ( ) Erlang/Java developer.
I wish you and your romanian company success! I am thinking about opening company in Romania but for me it is more dangerous (+ to your conditions I am not in Romania).
Estonia for my situation is more practical. I can open a company completely remotely. Russian language can be used in Estonia too. For me it is also a big edvantage.
9 Likes
Hello, My name is Derek, thanks for the invitation.
I was born in China by currently living in the US. I am a chip designer by trade but recently getting more and more interested in the software in general and distributed system in particular. I’ve always been attracted by the beauty of functional programming but Elixir and later Erlang are the only two that got me beyond a few tutorials. I am grateful for the wonderful eco-system that the Erlang forefathers laid out for us and am eager to contribute whatever meager help that I am capable of.
13 Likes
I created my company fully remotely before I have relocated with a help of other company which translated all documents I should sign to English and described Romanian law. However to create company remotely you need to send a full scan of your ID. The only one thing you need is a local bank account for paying taxes and the rest you can do remotely.
You can create a bank account in one day as long as you give them all documents. I forgot one document and they asked me to send it by e-mail, so you should not have a bigger problems here.
When I crossed Hungarian-Romanian border I only need ID or passport document. They would ask you typical questions like why you want to enter Romania, what is your company doing or what’s the name of city you want to do your things etc.
However if you have a company remotely then I’m not sure how taxes looks like due to your center of interests which would be in another country. This is something you need to ask about.
Send me a private message if you want and I can give you more details including contact to company which helped me. Maybe if I would find a time I would write a post describing how the whole process looks like in my case.
10 Likes
Hi there! I’m Jesse and I live in Portland, OR, USA. I’ve mainly used Elixir (and some excellent Erlang libraries like Cowboy via Phoenix) since 2016 or so. Right now I’m founder and CTO of Ratio PBC, a small consulting company that builds and maintains Elixir applications for New York’s and New Jersey’s COVID-19 response. Yep, the BEAM has been powering aspects of contact tracing since last summer!
We may be hiring soon and are looking to build a team of senior, smart and diverse people. If you know of anyone, please let me know via DM!
14 Likes
Hello everyone.
I am Björn, a self-taught software developer, living in Stockholm, Sweden. My interest for programming was spawned in 1979 when I learned to program on my Texas Instruments TI-59. A little later I started to program in BASIC and Fortran on the computers at school, and a few years later, I started using Forth on my TI-99/4A.
For some reason, I very early got interested in compilers and interpreters. I disassembled the interpreter for Scott Adams’s adventure games, and then wrote my own compiler to generate code for the interpreter. I also disassembled and studied Infocom’s Z-machine and wrote a disassembler for Z-machine games. A few years later when I got access to the Internet, I found out that all that had been done before and that there even existed a complete Z-machine specification.
Therefore, years later when I was about to join the OTP team at Ericsson and was asked whether I wanted to join the Erlang Runtime System team or the Database team, I didn’t need any time to think about my answer.
At first, I worked mostly with the Erlang runtime system for Windows, but soon BEAM and the Erlang compiler became my main responsibility (more details can be found in a blog post).
27 Likes
Hello, I’m just your average PHP developer looking for a way out.
I wrote a few small libraries like Cowboy, Ranch or Gun, tools like Erlang.mk or Looking Glass, and also made humble contributions to niche projects such as Erlang/OTP or RabbitMQ.
My main focus right now is fixing the RabbitMQ classic queues which ultimately turned into implementing a v2 while keeping support for the previous version around to facilitate switching back and forth. I am also (slowly) working on implementing HTTP/3.
Outside of computers I enjoy cycling, video games, board games, reading and witnessing the folly of humanity.
26 Likes
Hello, I’m Koko from Switzerland.
From Ruby to Elixir, then to Erlang.
But You are a god-like Erlang programmer.
Everyone using Phoenix is using your work 
Merci beaucoup!
16 Likes
Hi, I’m Mal in Seoul, Korea. I got into programming to build web things I couldn’t stop thinking about and not because I particularly have any kind of engineer’s mindset. I’m way more of a generalist than a specialist, though a generalist who can get down and dirty in the weeds, even obsessed. I started with Python, discovered it wasn’t great for (soft) real-time, went to JS, got into the Meteor framework, and then to Clojure which I love. But Clojure proved beyond my abilities, architecturally, and I found Elixir and the Phoenix Framework, and am extremely happy with them as tools for bringing things into the world. I’d like to learn Erlang little-by-little, and am also very receptive to LFE.
12 Likes
Hello!
My name is Lukas. I got into programming on my high school computer building a Monopoly clone using pascal. I came into contact with Erlang during university in the early 2000s and have been working with it since then. Since 2010 I’ve been at the Erlang/OTP team at Ericsson attempting to make Erlang harder, faster, better and stronger.
24 Likes
Is that You under the helmet?
9 Likes
Hi there! Thanks for this forum.
I’m Dairon, originally from Cuba and now living in Florida. I’m a self-taught programmer, formerly telecoms engineering student. I have been coding for ~13 years and discovered Erlang 5 years ago and cannot ever go back to the previous languages (Pascal, C, Python, Go) . I have used Erlang mainly for IoT servers and Gateway software, and was pretty active on the VerneMQ project (tough not so much the past year). Now I’m mainly working with Elixir, starting soon at System76 but all my for fun stuff is still in Erlang.
Beside programming I’m into cooking, kayaking, exploring the outdoors and growing tropical fruits.
13 Likes