#+BEGIN_COMMENT
.. title: Thank You Joe
.. slug: thank-you-joe
.. date: 2019-04-22 22:36:19 UTC
.. tags: work Erlang
.. category:
.. link:
.. description: Thank You Joe Armstrong
.. type: text

#+END_COMMENT
On April 20th, Francesco let the world [[https://twitter.com/FrancescoC/status/1119596234166218754][know]] that [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Armstrong_(programmer)][Joe Armstrong]] had passed.

The tributes and stories have been flowing steadily since:

- https://ferd.ca/goodbye-joe.html
- https://jlouis.github.io/posts/joe-goodbye/
- https://github.com/lukego/blog/issues/32
- https://thenewstack.io/why-erlang-joe-armstrongs-legacy-of-fault-tolerant-computing/

On various social media:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19706514
- https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bfchzb/joe_armstrong_the_creator_of_erlang_has_passed/
- https://twitter.com/search?q=%23rememberingjoe&src=typd

Having spoken several times at Erlang Factory / CodeBEAM, I had the pleasure of being in Joe's proximity many times, and chatted with him and my buddy Mark Diaz at one after-party. A recurring feature of stories around Joe was his laughter and exuberance and I was glad to be witness to it many times.

** My Erlang story

I started learning about Erlang around 2006 after reading an article Joe had written comparing Apache (which I was very familiar with) and YAWS, an Erlang HTTP server. Various modes of Apache fell over around 10K concurrent connections while YAWS happily continued until 70K or so. Intrigued, I started down the rabbit hole of learning about Erlang, distributed programming, functional programming, and something just...clicked. It felt right to my mind.

I ordered Joe's [[https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Erlang-Concurrent-Pragmatic-Programmers/dp/193778553X][book]] and started down the path. I started building a backend for some custom software to help manage an insurance agency, started learning about AMQP and RabbitMQ, CouchDB, and some other Erlang-based code, and started connecting a lot of dots from my computer science degree to a language born in industry. The best part, though, was rekindling the fun of programming again.

Lucky me, in 2010 a job posting went up on Craigslist with Erlang, RabbitMQ, and CouchDB listed in the nice-to-haves, for a startup telecom company. I knew nothing about VoIP or telecom really (other than having read some books about the 70s-90s-era phreakers like the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Deception][Masters of Deception]]). Lucky for [[https://2600hz.com][2600Hz]], they didn't know Erlang other than they wanted to use it but knew telecom.

We took a chance on each other and here we are, 9+ years later, all because Joe wrote a blog article a decade prior about a small experiment he had run. Butterfly wings and hurricanes!

So thank you Joe, for unknowingly being the catalyst of a career transformation, and helping me find my home in the Erlang community and at 2600Hz.