Nelson is a child of a multicultural journey. Born in Venezuela to a family of engineers and economists, he grew up in Spain to study pure maths in university and moved to Poland to become a self-taught programmer. After a few years as a C developer in security/telecommunication domains, he’s now an Erlang enthusiast with an emphasis on performance and security, a professional in the field of instant messaging and a core developer of MongooseIM. In his free time he’s a sports addict, practising yoga and callisthenics, and also a history fanboy, devouring books every night.
An extensible protocol implementation means that its core code has to be extensible, right? But it also means the core is the first piece of code ever written for this project, and which everything else will depend on, which means, well, highly likely future technical debt. Fast-forward over a decade, and this code might have become not just intractable, but also impossible to understand. What’s next? Incremental improvements, top-bottom or bottom-up, a full rewrite and replug, experiment with a mysterious and not fully tested spaghetti? In our chat’s backend service, we kept coming back to this topic, until one day that looked like it’d be just a boring day, we came up with a prototype for a remorseless full rewrite that immediately looked promising. Based on the OTP’s gen_statem behaviour, we wrote a new core set of extensible rules where everything can gracefully plug in. Let’s solve the quagmire putting together old code, RFCs, state machines and a telemetry-like event mechanism.
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