Who are the Current Candidates?
Kiko Fernandez-Reyes is member of the OTP team and holds a PhD in Computer Science by Uppsala University, Sweden. His PhD work has received multiple awards (2 Best Paper Awards and 2 Distinguished Artifact Awards) for the technical contributions, documentation, and source code (reproducibility). After his PhD, he worked at Klarna writing services in Haskell and Erlang, and he was a Board Member of the (Typed) Functional community in Klarna. Later on, he moved to Ericsson and tries to improve OTP little by little.
Why vote for him?
I have a mixed background between academia and industry. As part of the OTP team, I can act as a bridge between the OTP team and the EEF board as well as working groups. My academic background and connections can bring academics to help us get more innovation for BEAM languages. Innovation can come in several ways, for example, researchers/academic partners looking for more optimised garbage collection algorithms, improvements to success typing theory and practice, improvements to the JIT, or even a more energy efficient virtual machine. All of these things have an impact on all BEAM languages, and the OTP team cannot always do “blind” research on all of these topics. We are as strong as our community.
Bryan Paxton (a.k.a starbelly) (outgoing board member) has worked on the BEAM for roughly 8 years at companies utilizing Elixir, but sought to embed himself within the Erlang community at large (LFE, Gleam, etc.). He has a strong sense of community, has a passion for helping people, and chances are he has reached out to try and help you in the past. In his spare time he contributes to Erlang/OTP, Elixir, hex_core, hexpm, rebar3, and is a co-maintainer of setup-beam, verl, rebar3_ex_doc and rebar3_hex. He also has been an active contributor within the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation shortly after its inception.
Why vote for him?
As an annual supporting member, an active contributor, and a member of several BEAM communities; I have a vested interest in helping further the foundation’s goals and by extension the ecosystem. I bet the farm on the BEAM and as such I make it a point to be highly involved wherever and however I can to assist in furthering the success of the entire community and ecosystem.
David Bernheisel. I’m the co-host of the Thinking Elixir podcast and have been working with Elixir for 7 years for both agencies and product companies. I organized Safe Ecto Migrations, wrote a date time parser, a Phoenix SEO library, and elixirstream.dev.
Why vote for him?
I have found a digital home in Erlang’s ecosystem, and I want to serve my community and continue to evangelize for it. I’ve been in the podcast space for years now and want to leverage that along with the foundation.
Miriam Pena (outgoing board member) is one of the founding members of the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation, where she has sat on the board of directors for 5 years. As a Board Member, she has been a strong advocate for diversity in tech. Under her leadership, the foundation has introduced over 560 students and underrepresented groups in tech to Erlang and Elixir by funding their attendance at conferences and tutorials. She was the driving force behind a stipend program to provide economic support for the development of key libraries needed by the community. She co-founded the Education, Sponsorship, Fellowship and Marketing Work Groups and has represented the Foundation at events, conferences and in social media. She was also involved in the inception of the website and marketing campaign which launched the foundation in San Francisco in 2019.
Miriam is passionate about solving real life problems with highly scalable, concurrent soft real-time systems with demands of high availability. She has consulted and been employed as an Erlang expert in companies all over the world, from the automakers in Detroit to social networks in Madrid, passing through telcos in Stockholm to control systems for renewable energy in Spain… All this brought her to San Francisco, where she is a Software Engineer at WhatsApp.
Miriam obtained her Computer Science Engineering degree from A Coruña University (Spain). In 2018 she was selected as one of the Women in Tech To Watch by Women 2.0. On the community front, Miriam is one of the organizers of the Erlang and Elixir Meetup in San Francisco, helping grow the group to over 2300 members. She has keynoted at CodeBEAM Stockholm, San Francisco and EMPEX LA and spoken at many other events. Her talks have ranged from topics like The EEF and you: Unwrapping 5 years of the Foundation, to the more technical BEAM Extreme, Don’t Do This At Home to D&I topics Unsung Heroes of the BEAM. She has also been on the Program Committee organizing CodeBEAM conferences worldwide.
Why vote for her?
I have a strong belief in the potential of the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation and the developer community it represents. I’m a strong advocate for the Elixir community on the Board and will continue promoting the intermingling of Erlang and Elixir, as I believe that together, we are stronger. Elixir has a thriving and popular community that can revitalize the more established Erlang group; and in turn broaden its reach and impact.
Peer Stritzinger (outgoing board member). In the last 5 years, by setting up the EEF and getting it off the ground, I have demonstrated that I can get things done by being versatile and wearing many hats –technical as well as people focused. Being scrappy, resourceful and creative when necessary.
Peer discovered Erlang in 2007 and has been relying on it ever since. Fascinated by all its emergent properties which are quite non-obvious from afar. Around it he found the best developer community one could wish for being part of.
He is Founder and Director of Peer Stritzinger GmbH which created GRiSP www.grisp.org, a platform to run Erlang on small embedded systems for Edge and IoT/Fog applications and focusses on building GRiSP.io a novel holistic distributed computing platform for Cloud/Edge and IoT Fog which will offer the most benefit Erlang Ecosystem language users. Participating in several EU funded research projects, he is trying to push the envelope for what can be done with Erlang and the other languages on the BEAM. Peer Stritzinger GmbH is publishing an extensive collection of Erlang and Elixir Open-Source applications.
Peer’s previous experience ranges from low level device drivers to functional languages in industrialand automotive applications. He initially mastered in physics at the Technical University Munich. He has been working self-employed as a developer since 1987 and also consulted in applied cryptography and protocol design and implementation. He is since ever living and working in the idyllic countryside west of Munich, Bavaria.
Why vote for him?
Starting with several years in the Industrial Erlang User Group, the predecessor Organisation whose main goal was to create what is now the EEF, I’m happy to have been part of the work on making this all happen. As an active member on the board, I always look for ways to improve what we have reached and to introduce new ways of enhancing and growing our community and will continue to do so.
My main focus so far was helping to reach out to sponsors to increase EEFs income and help EEF funded development projects that benefit the ecosystem from the proposal writing to delivery and maintenance. I’m active in several working groups with the main goal of making sure they don’t fall inactive.
As part of the education working group, my main focus is outreach to universities teaching and researching with Erlang based technologies. I’m mentoring students, picking up projects as bachelor and master thesis. In the infrastructure working group I was mainly responsible for the membership database and try to steer the development of the tools we need to organise ourselves.
Should I be elected I will push forward to improve and expand our community by furthering these and similar projects. An important step to achieve this is to further the professionalization of the organization, which will accelerate all our common goals. In oder for this to happen we need to find more sponsors and I will intensify my engagement to grow the income of EEF. With that increased income we can hire for example an executive assistant and people to take care of our infrastructure to not over-rely on volunteer work for that. I believe that this also has the potential to reach out to even more possible sponsors so it will in effect at the minimum pay for itself.
For the funded projects we had the problem of not getting enough good proposals in the beginning. This situation improved a lot which means we actually have a reason why we need more sponsorship, which is the main question we see from potential sponsors. It might sound overly optimistic but I strongly believe we as EEF and the whole open-source community in our ecosystem should strive to get to a point that not only do we have the best programming languages and runtime but also best of breed tooling, documentation and libraries around it. This will be ultimative driver for community growth: when we achieve that and tell the world, people will join.
I will always have an open ear for everyone in the community and help remove all the obstacles which might hinder us to thrive. I will continue my engagement and frequent attendance in the board and working group meetings.
I strongly believe that the technologies built on top of Erlang and the BEAM have still by far not reached their full potential, let’s work together making this happen.