Why I Built a Course on the BEAM
Programming languages shape how we think. When the tool matches the problem, work becomes calmer. You see the system more clearly, and you spend less time fighting accidental complexity.
That lesson is one reason I keep returning to the BEAM, the runtime behind Erlang and Elixir.
At HappiHacking, we spend a lot of time on systems that need to stay reliable, maintainable, and fast. In that kind of work, the BEAM keeps proving its value. It gives you cheap processes, clear failure boundaries, supervision, message passing, and a runtime designed for long-lived systems. Those qualities matter when downtime is expensive and concurrency is part of the job.
Many Teams Still Meet the BEAM Only at the Surface
They learn enough Erlang or Elixir to ship features. They use OTP behaviours, build services, and get real value quickly. Then the harder questions arrive. A mailbox starts growing. Latency becomes uneven across nodes. Memory behaves differently under real traffic. Recovery takes longer than expected.
That gap between using the BEAM and understanding the BEAM is where this course lives.
A Stronger Mental Model
I built this course for developers who want a stronger mental model of the runtime. The aim is simple: help you reason more clearly about why BEAM systems behave as they do, and what to do when they do not behave the way you expected.
In the course, we look at schedulers, processes, mailboxes, memory behaviour, garbage collection, messaging, and the failure modes that tend to appear under real load. We also cover how to design concurrent systems using process archetypes and the Gnome Village metaphor, a way of thinking about BEAM systems as small, specialized workers cooperating in a shared environment.
Better mental models usually lead to better designs, faster diagnosis, and fewer avoidable surprises in production. You should leave with a clearer way to inspect live systems, better instincts for what to measure, and a firmer grasp of how to tune a system.
Who This Course Is For
This course is especially useful for teams building backend systems where reliability matters. Fintech is one obvious example, but it is not the only one. Messaging systems, internal platforms, transactional services, and other high-concurrency backends face many of the same pressures. If your system needs to survive changing load and keep its shape over time, a deeper understanding of the BEAM pays back quickly.
I have spent much of my career working close to languages, runtimes, and systems that need to keep working. My PhD focused on compiling Erlang. Later I worked on Scala at EPFL. At Klarna, I joined early enough to help shape both the system and the engineering organization as it grew. Across those experiences, the pattern has been fairly consistent: performance follows understanding, and reliable systems begin with the right mental model.
That is what this course is meant to provide.
It is for developers who want to move beyond cargo-cult OTP. It is for teams that want calmer operations, better debugging habits, and more confidence when systems come under pressure. It is for people who suspect that the BEAM has more to teach them than syntax and conventions.
Join a Session
The next public session is at ElixirConf EU in Malaga on April 22, a full-day training the day before the conference. Early bird pricing ends March 11.
You can also book a private workshop for your team. For private training, I can tailor the material to your architecture, your failure modes, and the questions your team is already facing.
