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About the Book

Welcome to The BEAM DYK Handbook!

This book is a curated collection of my LinkedIn posts from the #BEAMDYK series, where I share insights, trivia, and fascinating details about the BEAM, the Erlang virtual machine, which was built in the 80's by Ericsson to automate telecom switches and now powers some of the world’s most robust, scalable, distributed, concurrent, and fault-tolerant systems, whether coded in Erlang, Elixir, or the newcomer Gleam.

This isn’t just a book for engineers or coding enthusiasts. It’s written with a broader audience in mind: entrepreneurs, business leaders, and tech-curious individuals who want to understand why the BEAM matters, how it adds value to business, and what makes it a unique value proposition for both businesses and engineers.

While most programming language runtimes are designed to execute code efficiently and as fast as possible, where system crashes are costly and often unavoidable within the capabilities of their runtimes, the BEAM is designed to keep systems running no matter what, embracing failure as a normal state. The design philosophy of the BEAM follows the principle of “let it crash," an approach that allows BEAM processes to fail and restart without impacting the overall system. This resilience is built in from the beginning and is one of the reasons why services built on the BEAM have industry-leading uptime and reliability.

About the Author

Paulo Renato

I am Paulo Renato, located in the United Kingdom, and I have over 15 years of experience in Software Development, with 10 years as a Software Engineer and 5 years as a Developer Advocate for Mobile API Security.

If I had to describe myself in one sentence, I would say that I am a self-driven person with strong communication skills, fuelled by my passion for the BEAM, software development, security, problem-solving, overcoming technical challenges, collaboration, and mentoring.

What brought me into Elixir was a 2016 DevOps meetup I attended in Edinburgh (Scotland, UK), where I got impressed by how systems built on the BEAM could run at scale, be resilient to failure, and highly available under very high loads.

I am also developing the [Elixir Scribe](https://github.com/Exadra37/elixir-scribe) tool to close some gaps in the Elixir ecosystem and help developers to write more Clean Code in a Clean Software Architecture. This tool aims to reduce code complexity, which translates into fewer bugs and contributes to less technical debt while improving developer experience and productivity.

As a human being, I try to follow three important lessons from my parents: Don't do to others what you don't like for yourself; Don't let for tomorrow what you can say today, but be nice while doing it; Don't sugar-coat your feedback with phrases that require reading between the lines, because they may not be caught or may be misunderstood. This leads me to always ask people I first meet in my personal or professional life to be frontal and direct with their feedback to ensure I get their message in order to be able to act on it.