Redistributing Our Systems. Erlang's Enduring Lessons for Local-First
From BEAM There, Done That by Plangora
April 10, 2026 · 52 min · Season 1 · Episode 6
About this episode
The episode discusses the enduring lessons of Erlang in the context of local-first software and modern distributed systems.
Erlang was designed for reliability in telephone switches, but its core principles — isolated processes, message passing, “let it crash supervision — anticipated problems we’re only now grappling with at scale. Four decades later, these ideas are finding new expression in local-first software: apps that work offline, sync peer-to-peer, and put users back in control of their data.In this podcast, Robert Virding (Erlang co-creator) and Brooke Zelenka trace the intellectual lineage from telecom switches to CRDTs and capabilities. They’ll explore how Erlang’s fault-tolerance model maps onto modern challenges, distributed security, and systems that continue to work offline. The cloud promised to simplify distributed systems; instead concentrated in a handful of companies; perhaps the answers we need were hiding in a language designed for phone switches all along.
People in this episode
Guests: Robert Virding, Brooke Zelenka
Topics covered
- Erlang
- local-first software
- fault-tolerance
- distributed systems
- offline capabilities
- data control
Keywords
- Erlang
- local-first
- reliability
- message passing
- fault-tolerance
- offline
- data control
- distributed security
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Erlang, Plangora
Books & works: CRDTs
More episodes of BEAM There, Done That
- Why Multiplayer Games Are Just Distributed Systems | Ellyse Cedeno on BEAM & the Actor Model · June 12, 2026 · 1h 7m
- Who Builds the Next Generation of Senior Devs? Bruce Tate on AI, Juniors, and the Career Path Crisis · June 5, 2026 · 1h 7m
- AI Found 5 CVEs in One Afternoon — The BEAM Security Wake-Up Call | Peter Ullrich & Jonathan Machen · May 29, 2026 · 1h 2m
- Inside the BEAM: Björn Gustavsson on Maps, Records, and Runtime Design · May 22, 2026 · 55 min
- Inside Phoenix: A Plug, a Macro, and What You Need to Know To Build Your Own Framework · May 15, 2026 · 1h 2m
- Zero-Cost Meets Let-It-Crash: The Rust + Elixir Power Combo · May 8, 2026 · 59 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the BEAM There, Done That podcast page.