In this edition of our “Meet the Team” series, we’d like to introduce you to Joanna Wrona, Business Unit Leader for the Kraków office at Erlang Solutions.

She discusses her role at ESL and her passion for empowering her team. She also gives us a glimpse into life in beautiful Kraków and what makes her journey so fulfilling.

About Joanna

What is your role at Erlang Solutions?

I am the Business Unit Leader at Erlang Solutions, based in Kraków, Poland. I oversee the business unit’s day-to-day operations.

My role focuses on supporting and guiding our great team of talented and passionate Erlang and Elixir developers. I’m dedicated to creating an environment where they can thrive while ensuring we achieve our goals and stay true to our values: teamwork, knowledge sharing, sustainability, passion and fun.

Equally important is our partnership with our customers – we work closely with them, valuing their input and collaboration as we strive to deliver the best possible outcomes.

I also identify new market opportunities to help us grow and strengthen our regional presence. My leadership is rooted in serving our team and customers so everyone succeeds.

What have been some highlights of your career so far?

For over a decade, I have worked with passionate people who excel at what they do and genuinely love the technologies we use. Watching them grow, develop, and contribute to our success is incredibly gratifying.

I’m also very proud of our low employee turnover. Many team members have been with us for over a decade, which reflects the positive work environment we’ve built and the deep fulfilment that comes from being part of such a dedicated business.

It feels good to work here.

What are some of the most important lessons you’ve learned about leadership?

I’ve learned that leadership is fundamentally about service and empathy. Effective leaders prioritise the needs of their teams and create environments where people feel valued, supported, empowered, and listened to. I draw inspiration from thought leaders like Simon Sinek, Brené Brown, Robert Greenleaf and Kim Scott. Their work has helped shape my approach to servant-style leadership.

While it’s not always easy, it’s incredibly rewarding.

Having mentors and leadership workshops with our executive management team has also been invaluable in my journey. I’ve been fortunate to have great mentors and colleagues, like Michał Ślaski, who first brought me to Erlang Solutions and Erik Schön, a fellow Business Unit Leader in Sweden, whose insights and books on leadership continue to inspire me.

Are there any exciting projects you and the team are working on now?

Yes- we have recently launched the MongooseIM Autoscaler, which is a solution for businesses looking to increase or decrease the capacity of their MongooseIM cluster. It is also for businesses seeking a chat solution, existing chat applications or businesses with variable loads.

Tell us about what life is like in Poland- what does a typical day look like for you?

My most important responsibility is as a mother to two teenagers. My schedule is often dictated by school calendars and family events!

I’m fortunate to live in Kraków. I enjoy biking to work, which allows me to pass by iconic landmarks like Wawel Castle, Main Square, Zakrzówek and along the Vistula River.

It’s a great way to start my day and appreciate the city’s beauty.

Tell us one thing you can’t live without.

Well, it is not a thing, but it’s people around me (my partner, kids, family, friends, colleagues at work). To me, life is a journey that is best when you can share it with others.

Final thoughts

We love connecting with people—whether it’s over coffee at our offices or conferences around the world. If you’d like to connect with Joanna, catch her at the GOTO EDA Day in Warsaw on 19th September.

If you would like to learn more about what we do, drop the team a line .

The post Meet the team: Joanna Wrona appeared first on Erlang Solutions .

CTOs with instant messaging requirements are facing a challenge. Whether they are looking to improve an existing instant messaging system or implement one for the first time, they need a messaging solution that can scale to meet growing demands. It must also integrate with existing systems and remain future-proof against technological changes. It sounds like a lot to ask for, but traditional methods are no longer cutting it when it comes to the complex needs of modern business.

MongooseIM is designed to address those critical challenges and empower businesses with its robust messaging infrastructure – from managing IoT devices and securing communications to supporting internal collaboration and customer support.

In this post, we’ll be taking a look at the five ways optimising MongooseIM can offer the best in scalable and future-proof messaging solutions to maximise productivity and drive innovation.

What is MongooseIM?

So what Is MongooseIM? MongooseIM is a “robust and efficient chat (or instant messaging) platform aimed at large installations.”

As an open-source messaging platform built on the XMPP standard, MongooseIM is designed for large-scale, high-performance communication, making it ideal for businesses. Its robust, secure and scalable framework can enhance internal collaboration, improve customer support and improve real-time data sharing. It’s easily customisable thanks to open-source technology, so can be tailored to specific needs, improving overall operational effectiveness and business efficiency.

Adapting to business growth

Businesses need a messaging solution that fits in seamlessly with their growth goals. The unique features of MongooseIM are designed to adapt to those growth goals with ease.

Horizontal scalability

A prevalent business feature for MongooseIM is horizontal scalability. Why is this so popular? Well as your business expands, so does the demand for messaging services. Horizontal scalability allows you to add more servers to handle a growing workload without any service interruption. This allows for continued reliable communication, which is critical to maintaining performance while handling increased data volume. If you would like more about the importance of horizontal scalability, you can explore how MongooseIM scales horizontally in more detail.

Flexible architecture with MongooseIM

MongooseIM offers a wide range of pluggable and configurable modules. Its modular design allows for unmatched flexibility, allowing businesses to scale individual components based on their specific needs.

The types of flexible architecture provided by MongooseIM include:

Modular design : Allows for the scaling of individual components that are based on specific needs.

Optimised resource usage : Allows for efficient growth management of data, users and other features.

Adaptability : Allows for adjustments without the need to overhaul the entire system.

Dynamic Configuration

Multi-tenancy is another major advantage of MongooseIM. It supports dynamic management of XMPP domains, allowing businesses to adjust their infrastructure without the need for any downtime. This enables real-time scaling and flexible reconfiguration to meet changing demands. For more details, you can explore this blog post on dynamic XMPP domains .

Real-time scaling and reconfiguration are key for maintaining continued customer satisfaction without compromising on service quality. Your messaging solution will remain robust and most importantly, responsive.

Provides seamless scalability

We have explained the importance of horizontal scalability as a key feature of MongooseIM.

But scalability in general is where the messaging platform truly excels.

MongooseIM offers several means of scalability, designed to support the traffic of XMPP servers, dependent on load. The main feature of the recently released MongooseIM 6.2.1 is its improved CETS in-memory storage backend , designed to further simplify and enhance its scalability offering.

So how have these capabilities impacted real-life businesses? It has been crucial for facing the rapid growth needs of demands of many, but here are some key examples:

Pando Health

Pando Health is an app designed to modernise doctor-to-doctor communication. Before it was widely introduced to the NHS, it had to resolve its ill-fitting technology issues. It was still using WhatsApp and other dated solutions like pagers for daily communication, which was far from efficient.

Switching to the MongooseIM platform solved its scalability limitations and improved the visibility and traceability of the app. Thanks to the flexibility of the previously mentioned XMPP, it provided the chance for simple customisation and configuration if needed. It also opened up the chance to extend chat functionalities to support its future growth goals.

You can explore the case study to learn more about MongooseIM’s business transformation of the Pando Health app.

Beekeeper

Beekeeper IO used MongooseIM to help deliver efficient, scalable messaging performance.

It is the top employee app, designed for frontline teams to lead the force for deskless workers. The migration to MongooseIM resulted in a vast performance improvement for the platform thanks to its scalable and flexible nature.

These improvements include:

1. Efficiently managing increased customer demand and traffic: Seamlessly handled due to MongooseIM’s architecture.
2. Horizontal scaling : Allowed for the system to expand efficiently to meet growing needs.
3. Decoupling chat functionality : Improved the development processes by separating the chat from the main system.
4. Streamlined agile development cycles: This allowed for quicker iterations and faster bug fixes.
5. Accelerated feature delivery: For faster development and the release of new features.
6. XMPP protocol: Enhanced real-time communication capabilities. XMPP perfectly suited Beekeeper’s Frontline Success System and messaging requirements.

To learn more about the Beekeeper MongooseIM business transformation click here.

In these examples, MongooseIM’s ability to scale allowed Pando Health and Beekeeper to grow their messaging needs. The scaling features of MongooseIM were enhanced to accommodate for increased user growth and high-performance standards, without compromising on user experience.

Offers top security

Security and privacy have become a major cause for concern in the past few years. Unfortunately, major instant messaging apps have faced heavy criticism for the way they store, collect and share data. This has understandably led to real scrutiny among businesses and users alike. But MongooseIM is built with business security in mind. Its features ensure that security remains robust for its users.

End-to-end encryption and GDPR compliance

End-to-end encryption is fully supported by MongooseIM, preventing any unauthorised access and protecting sensitive information. It is also General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant, allowing users to adjust privacy settings according to their personal preferences. For businesses, particularly those operating in heavily regulated industries operating within the EU and UK, this level of compliance is crucial to ensure they meet data protection requirements.

Continuous security testing and integration

MongooseIM takes no chances when it comes to security.

If there is a change to the system’s code, the repository runs hundreds of unit tests, via GitHub’s continuous integration system. The tests are built with modern software testing and static analysis technologies, designed to catch security vulnerabilities from the early stages of the development process.

If you’re a business looking to future-proof its messaging strategies, MongooseIM ensures that sensitive information is safeguarded against unauthorised access, which addresses the concerns of businesses on all levels. MongooseIM meets current security standards and also anticipates and adapts to future regulatory requirements.

MongooseIM for simple, easy deployment

For businesses looking for a fast, efficient way to implement messaging solutions, MongooseIM can simplify the deployment process.

As the saying goes, time is money. MongooseIM’s fast set-up means your operational platform will be up fast, allowing businesses to engage with their customers and internal teams immediately. The rapid deployment means business downtime is reduced but business continuity is maintained.

Seamless integration

Integration of a new system into an existing infrastructure can be a hurdle that understandably, businesses want to avoid. But MongooseIM fits seamlessly into existing setups, providing compatibility with popular platforms and protocols such as XMPP and GraphQL . So whether it be a mobile app, web platform or internal communication tools, this integration allows for minimal disruption to day-to-day operations.

Scalability from day one

As your business grows, so do your messaging needs. MongooseIM’s distributed architecture is designed for scalability, meaning your messaging solution can expand as your user base increases. Your business is able to handle increased demand without the need for time-consuming and costly reconfigurations. The use of Kubernetes for orchestration also helps manage and scale deployments efficiently.

Developer-friendly

MongooseIM comes with active community support, so developers can integrate, implement and manage with ease. GitHub automates testing and deployment processes, which allows developers to adapt quickly to the system, roll out features faster and keep everything running smoothly.

MongooseIM’s swift and easy deployment facilitates agile growth and minimises operational disruptions, providing a dependable option for businesses to scale and future-proof messaging solutions.

Reliable, no-risk technology

MongooseIM relies on the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) open standard, a solution trusted by businesses globally. XMPP’s widespread adoption is scalable across diverse industries.

Think of XMPP as the backbone that supports your messaging needs as your business grows. Its open-source nature means it is constantly evolving and being refined by developers. This ongoing support ensures your messaging platform remains secure, efficient, and adaptable without the need for constant oversight.

Whether your operations are small-scale or aimed at global expansion, MongooseIM’s solutions are dependable and scalable, providing confidence in handling today’s needs and preparing for future challenges. If you would like to learn more about MongooseIM and other XMPP applications, check out this post on optimising instant messaging.

To conclude

MongooseIM is the ideal solution for businesses seeking a modern messaging platform that meets the demands of scalability and future readiness, while also supporting their growth objectives.

As an open-source technology, MongooseIM is free and readily available for businesses to use and adapt to meet their needs. Supported by a thriving global community of contributors, it undergoes continuous improvement to add features, improve vulnerabilities, fix bugs and enhance overall security. That many eyes on the code means continuous innovation and quality control, benefitting all users.

Open-source technology is also a cost-effective choice, with no upfront costs or long-term license fees to manage. Businesses are not tied to any particular suppliers, enhancing flexibility.

MongooseIM’s horizontal scalability also supports seamless business growth, while flexible architecture allows for tailored deployments and efficient resource management. Real-time time scaling and dynamic multi-tenancy enhance responsiveness, ensuring consistent service quality.

Security features like end-to-end encryption and GDPR compliance provide imperative data protection, crucial for regulatory compliance and user trust. With straightforward deployment and seamless integration, MongooseIM minimises downtime and accelerates new solution launches, which maximises productivity and innovation.

If you would like to talk more about MongooseIM’s capabilities, feel free to contact our expert team.

The post 5 Ways MongooseIM Provides Scalable and Future-Proof Messaging appeared first on Erlang Solutions .

Without use of constructs, you will unravel few mysteries.

Without knowledge of mysteries, your constructs will fail.

Find the strength to pursue both, for these are our prayers.

And to that end, welcome comfort, for without it, you cannot stay strong.

Becky Chambers has always been known for her political science fiction. Whether it’s criticisms of the overly-bureaucratic and often classist, but ultimately well-meaning, Galactic Commons (read “Space EU”) in her Wayfarers series or the “working class” astronauts of To Be Taught, If Fortunate , the politics are always close to the surface in her stories. Unlike these previous novels which perform the classic sci-fi trick of using the future to reflect on the present, Monk & Robot is her first explicitly solar punk speculative fiction series. Instead of exporting our current society across the galaxy, the Monk & Robot books ask what our current society could become with a prod in the right direction. The only hint we see of the present day are memories of the “factory age”, long ago, and worries about repeating it.

The two novellas, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy are, like her other novels, unabashedly anarchist and queer. Where they differ from the high-tech, space-opera anarchism of Record of a Spaceborn Few is in the level of technology embraced by the Pangan society. With the notable exception of one of the main characters, the robot Splendid Speckled Mosscap (it/its), we see very little technology beyond what we humans of the 21st century could create. There are no space ships, phasers, or warp drive. Instead, the most advanced pieces of technology we see are mobile phones (albeit repairable ones that are “designed to last a lifetime”, a far cry from the planned obsolescence of today), the mention of communication satellites, and the occasional solar panel or bio-plastic 3D printer. This relative lack of technology, coupled with the way the cities and towns of Panga (the small moon on which the stories are set) live in harmony with the natural world, has led some to use the story as a way to explore ideas of anarcho-primitivism through the lens of Wild-Built. However, with the exception of one seaside community that spurns all technology beyond simple tools, this comparison does not seem apt.

The main character of Wild-Built is the tea monk—a roving therapist with the job description “listen to people, give tea”—Sibling Dex (they/them). Dex finds themself unsatisfied with their work and questioning their value to society. They set out to solve their meaning crisis in the way monks in literature have done for generations: by climbing a mountain (quite literally, in Dex’s case). However, upon returning from the mountain and their low-tech lifestyle with their new friend Mosscap in tow, they make it quite clear that anarco-primitivism does not accurately reflect their views:

The thing about fucking off to the woods is that unless you are a very particular, very rare sort of person, it does not take long to understand why people left said woods in the first place. Houses were invented for excellent reasons, as were shoes, plumbing, pillows, heaters, washing machines, paint, lamps, soap, refrigeration, and all the other countless trappings humans struggle to imagine life without.

The anarcho-primitivist sees technology and industrialization as the cause of our current climate collapse, but Sibling Dex is critical of this view while simultaneously turning a critical eye on the technology itself if it would jeopardize a sustainable world.

the moment they pedaled their wagon out of the wilderness and onto the highway, Dex felt the indescribable relief of switching back to the flip side of that equation—the side in which humans had made existence as comfortable as technology would sustainably allow.

Emphasis mine. This is similar to the view taken by another group over 200 years ago in pre-Industrial England. Becky Chambers’ vision of a de-growth future, and the broader de-growth movement, should instead be seen through the lens of their ideas instead: the 19ᵗʰ century textile workers and followers of General Ludd.

The Luddites are remembered in pop culture only through the capitalist propaganda that sought to discredit their uprising, and this also leads to frequent comparisons with anarco-primitivists or assertions that the Luddites wished to return to a pre-industrial world. But unlike the anarco-primitivists with their critique of civilization and industry, the Luddites—on the whole—weren’t anti-industrialist at all. Quite the contrary, they were often skilled machinists who made improvements and fixes to the engines and frames they would later smash.

In his book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech Brian Merchant describes the source of their ire:

Machinery, or technology, gets painted as the main target of the Luddites’ hatred and attacks, but the ultimate source of their rage was the factory system that those machines made possible. It was not the gig mill alone, nor the wide frames or power looms—it was the specific mode of domination over workers that the factory created that they felt such deep trepidation and anger toward.

This echo’s a quote from A Prayer for the Crown-Shy when Sibling Dex gets into a sectarian debate with Mx. Avery who argues the anarco-primitivist position against Dex’s more mainstream (for the world of Panga) views. Dex says:

“I’d say there’s no harm in any sort of construct so long as said construct has been proven to do no harm.”

Sound familiar? This mirrors the Luddist critique of the industrial revolution in a startlingly succinct manner. It was not civilization, or the machines themselves, which the Luddites eschewed, it was the factory model they enabled. Even the name used for Panga’s troubled past, the “factory age”, seems chosen to reflect the shift in working conditions the Luddites were trying to avert. There is no harm in the robot Mosscap, nor in the power loom, but the use to which they were put by the factories caused great harm never the less (for the workers in both cases, but I doubt the power looms experienced the hardship of robots, even if both are objects according to Mosscap itself). While Mx. Avery, chooses to eschew all post-industrial machines, Dex chooses instead to evaluate each machine based only on whether it is used to do harm.

This is the difference, in essence, between anarco-primitivism and what we might call “new Luddism”. The anarco-primitivist may see the gig economy forcing workers into long hours for little pay that is governed by obtuse algorithms or AI designed to make the company the most money at their expense and say “the cause of this is industrialization and civilization”. Or the casual news consumer may read the headline “The Robots Are Coming For Our Jobs!” and blame the robots. Chambers asserts that neither of these things are the problem. As Merchant put it:

If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are.

Or, as Chambers puts it:

when extractive factories stayed open all twenty hours of the day without a single pair of human hands at work in them—despite the desperate need for those same hands to find some sort, any sort of employment … We had bastardized constructs to the point that it was killing us.

In both cases we are the problem and we should think critically about new technologies based on how they affect people. Do they provide comfort without harm, or harm for the sake of comfort?

It’s a common criticism of Solar Punk as a literary and artistic movement that it does not address the period of change between the future world and today. From the Pangan culture and religion we can infer that technology is embraced only in so far as it serves humanity and the environment, and that this wasn’t always so. What we don’t know is what cultural or political calamity might have happened to change and unify the minds of Panga’s various peoples. Chambers doesn’t tell us how the people of Panga reacted after the Awakening, when the robots woke up and went on strike, or what the path from their factory age to the thoughtful, low-tech world of the novellas was. Perhaps it required something similar to the World War III that sparked the fully automated luxury space Communism of the Star Trek future, or the uninhabitable earth that led to the anarchist Exodan society in Chambers' Wayfarers series, or perhaps it was a peaceful and gradual transition: we just don’t know. Panga’s factory age may or may not have been ended by Enoch’s hammer, but even if their future wasn’t created by the actions of Luddites it is still a reflection of what could be if we embrace Luddist thinking about technology. By contrast the Luddite revolution of 1812, the brutal way the workers were put down, and the resulting society that we’ve inherited today provide us a warning from the past about what can happen if we don’t.

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Want to read any of the books in this article? Don’t support the factory owners, support the Luddites and robot workers of the world! Check if your local library has them first, and if not get them on my bookshop to support me and your local bookstore at the same time! The other bookshop.org links in this article are also affiliate links.

If you think others should read these books, consider donating a copy to a Little Free Library in Cobb County, GA by purchasing them through this wish list ! All purchases from this list go in Little Free Libraries around the Smyrna and Marietta , GA areas.

Welcome to our first-ever Elixir blog round-up!

This is your guide to some of our most insightful articles on the Elixir programming language. Our experts have written several posts to further your knowledge, regardless of where you’re at in your Elixir journey.

So whether you’re a business leader looking to discover Elixir’s benefits, a seasoned developer looking for the latest Elixir updates, or just new to the language, we’ll have an article to keep you covered.

What is Elixir?

New to Elixir? ‘What is Elixir?’ is an in-depth introduction to the renowned programming language. It details Elixir’s history and its foundation on the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM). It also breaks down the practical application of Elixir across various domains, including web development, embedded systems and real-time applications.

You can also find out more about Elixir’s vibrant community, extensive tools, and practical applications in major companies, proving its undeniable relevance to the community.

Comparing Elixir vs Java

Are you curious to learn how Elixir stacks up against Java in real-world applications?

In ‘Comparing Elixir vs Java’ by Attila Stragli, read about why Elixir’s lightweight processes, built-in fault tolerance, and concurrency make it the go-to choice for scalable, resilient systems—particularly when compared to Java’s more traditional approach.

Explore the nuances of its performance, ease of use, and which language truly shines under pressure.

A Comprehensive Guide to Elixir v Ruby

Choosing the right programming language is key to defining a long-term business strategy. If you’re weighing out Elixir and Ruby, understanding each language’s strengths and potential trade-offs can hugely impact your decision.

In ‘A Comprehensive Guide to Elixir v Ruby’ , we explore how Elixir’s scalability and fault tolerance might serve your growing business needs. Meanwhile, Ruby’s ease of use and mature ecosystem could streamline your operations. Our detailed analysis can help you make an informed choice that aligns with your company’s strategic goals and future growth.

Fastest Programming Language- Making the Case for Elixir

Concerned about speed?

Choosing the fastest programming language can significantly impact a business’s performance and adaptability. In ‘ Fastest Programming Language: Making the Case for Elixir, ’ the team explains why Elixir as a language stands out among its peers. Discover how its unique features can elevate your development process and why it might be the ideal choice for your next project.

Why Elixir is the Programming Language You Should Learn in 2024

We might be more than halfway through the year, but it’s never too late to develop your skills!

Discover ‘ Why Elixir Programming is the Language You Should Learn in 2024’ might be your ideal next step. We explore Elixir’s user-friendly nature, its robust performance under high traffic, and promising career opportunities.

That combined with its vibrant community, versatile tooling, and full-stack development capabilities makes it an attractive choice for modern developers.

To conclude

Thank you for exploring our first Elixir blog round-up! We hope that our curated guide provides valuable information to support your Elixir journey. If you’d discuss how Elixir can benefit your projects, feel free to contact the team .

The post Elixir Blog Round-Up appeared first on Erlang Solutions .

Erlang Solutions, a world-leading provider of software development and consultancy services, is pleased to announce its latest customer win with BoardClic, the leading platform for digital board performance reviews.

Following a successful Elixir code and architecture review, Erlang Solutions has been appointed to deliver advanced Elixir development for BoardClic.

Commenting on the latest partnership, Erik Schön, Business Unit Leader at Erlang Solutions said: ”We are excited to continue our relationship with BoardClic.Their innovative approach to board performance software aligns perfectly with our commitment to delivering robust and scalable solutions.”

Johan Tell, VP of Engineering at BoardClic, added “After receiving a comprehensive code and architecture review from Erlang Solutions, we quickly identified that they had the expertise needed to enhance our platform capabilities. We look forward to continuing to work with the team to further our growth goals.”

BoardClic is recognised as one of the top 30 fastest-growing technology companies in Sweden in 2023, experiencing an impressive growth rate of 1112% over the past four years.

With over 20 years of expertise, Erlang Solutions is renowned for its world-leading consultants in Erlang, Elixir, and beyond. The company delivers efficient and reliable system solutions for some of the world’s most ambitious companies.

The post Erlang Solutions wins business with BoardClic in a new era of collaboration appeared first on Erlang Solutions .

At first glance, it may sound absurd. Here we have technical debt, a purely engineering problem, as technical as it can get, and another area, HR, dealing with psychology and emotions, put into one sentence. Is it possible that they are closely related? Let’s take it apart and see.

Exploring technical debt

What is technical debt, anyway? A tongue-in-cheek definition is that it is code written by someone else. But there is more to it – it is code written years ago, possibly by someone who has left the company. Also, every major piece of software is written incrementally over many years. Even if it started with a very detailed, well-thought-through design, there inevitably came plenty of modifications and additions which the original design could not easily accommodate.

Your predecessors sometimes had to cut corners and bend over backwards to achieve desired results in an acceptable amount of time. Then they moved on, someone else took over and so on.

What you now have is a tangled mess, mixing coding styles, techniques and design patterns, with an extra addition of ad-hoc solutions and hacks. You see a docstring like “temporary solution, TODO: clean up”, you run git blame and it is seven years old. It happens to everybody.

The business behind technical debt

Technical debt is a business issue. You can read about it in more detail in our previous post .

Source: Medium

The daily tasks of most developers are fixing bugs and implementing new features in existing code. The more messy and convoluted the code is, the more time it takes every time one has to read it and reason about it. And it is real money: according to McKinsey Report , this burden amounts to 20%-40% of an average business’ technology stack. Engineers are estimated to spend up to 50% of their time struggling with it.

So what can businesses do to get their code in check? Here are some suggestions:

• Taking a step back
• Reassessing the architecture and techniques
• Making more informed choices
• Rewriting parts of the code to make it consistent and understandable, removing unused code and duplications

Unfortunately, this is very rarely done, since it does not bring any visible improvements to the product – clients are not interested in code quality, they want software that does its job. Improving the code costs real money, while the increase in developer productivity is impossible to quantify.

Technical debt also has another property – it is annoying. And this brings us nicely to the second topic.

Happy HR, Happier devs

What is HR about? In part, it is about the well-being of employees. Every employer wants good people to stay in the company. The most valuable employee is someone who likes their job and feels good about the place. HR departments go to great lengths to achieve this.

But, you can buy new chairs and phones, decorate the office, buy pizza, organise board games evenings – all this is mostly wasted if the following morning your devs show up in their workplace only to say “Oh no, not this old cruft again”, embellishing that statement with a substantial amount of profanities.

Now I tell you this: Nothing makes developers happier than allowing them to address their pain points. Ask them what they hate the most about the codebase and let them improve it, the way they choose to, at their own pace. They will be delighted.

You may ask how I know. Firstly, I’m a dev myself. Secondly, I’m fortunate enough to be currently working for a company that took the steps and did exactly that:

Step 1: Set up a small “tech debt” team

Step 2: Collected improvement proposals from all developers

Step 3: Documented them

Step 4: Defined priorities

Currently, the technical debt team or the proposers themselves are gradually putting these proposals into action, one by one. The code is getting better. We are becoming more productive. And if we’re happy, isn’t HR?

Calling upon the compassionate and proactive HR professionals out there: talk to your CTOs, tell them you all are after the same thing – you want these frustrated, burned-out coders happy, enthusiastic and more productive, and that you have an idea of how to achieve this.

Chances are they will be interested.

The post Technical debt and HR – what do they have in common? appeared first on Erlang Solutions .

The ejabberd Docs website did just get a major rework: new content management system, reorganized navigation, improved markdown, and several improvements!

Brief documentation timeline

ejabberd started in November 2002 (see a timeline in the ejabberd turns 20 blog post). And the first documentation was published in January 2003, using LaTeX, see Ejabberd Installation and Operation Guide . That was one single file, hosted in the ejabberd CVS source code repository, and was available as a single HTML file and a PDF.

As the project grew and got more content, in 2015 the documentation was converted from LaTeX to Markdown , moved from ejabberd repository to a dedicated docs.ejabberd.im git repository, and published using a Go HTTP server in docs.ejabberd.im , see an archived ejabberd Docs site .

New ejabberd Docs site

Now the ejabberd documentation has moved to MkDocs+Material, and this brings several changes and improvements:

Site and Web Server:

• Replaced Go site with MkDocs
• Material theme for great features and visual appeal, including light/dark color schemes
• Still written in Markdown, but now using several MkDocs, Material and Python-Markdown extensions
• The online site is built by GitHub Actions and hosted in Pages, with smaller
  automatic deployment time
• Offline reading: the ejabberd Docs site can be downloaded as a PDF or zipped HTML, see the links in home page

Navigation

• Major navigation reorganization, keeping URLs intact so old links still work (only Install got some relevant URL changes)
• Install section is split into several sections: Containers, Binaries, Compile, …
• Reorganized the Archive section, and now it includes the corresponding Upgrade notes
• Several markdown files from the ejabberd and docker-ejabberd repositories are now incorporated here

Content

• Many markdown visual improvements, specially in code snippets
• Options and commands that were modified in the last release will show a mark, see for example API Reference
• Version annotations are shown after the corresponding title, see for example sql_flags
• Modules can have version annotations, see for example mod_matrix_gw
• Links to modules, options and API now use the real name with _ character instead of - (compare old #auth-opts with #auth_opts ). The old links are still supported, no broken links.
• Listen Modules section is now better organized
• New experimental ejabberd Developer Livebook

So, please check the revamped ejabberd Docs site, and head to docs.ejabberd.im git repository to report problems and propose improvements.

The post ejabberd Docs now using MkDocs first appeared on ProcessOne .

We are happy to announce the release of Smack 4.4.8, our XMPP-client library for JVMs and Android. For a high-level overview of what’s changed in Smack 4.4.8, check out Smack’s changelog

Smack 4.4.8 contains mostly small fixes. However, we fixed one nasty bug in Smack’s reactor causing an, potentially endless, busy loop. Smack’s new connection infrastrucutre makes heavy use of the reactor, that enables tausands of connections being served by only a handful of threads.

As always, this Smack patchlevel release is API compatible within the same major-minor version series (4.4) and all Smack releases are available via Maven Central .

We would like to use this occasion to point at that Smack now ships with a NOTICE file. Please note that this adds some requirements when using Smack as per the Apache License 2.0 . The content of Smack’s NOTICE file can conveniently be retrieved using Smack.getNoticeStream() .

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