12 years supporting Software Architecture teaching with BEAMs
summary
Over 12 years the course uses the BEAM ecosystem (Erlang then Elixir) and OTP primitives to make students implement and break real architectures: 15-week course, 60–80 students, team projects of 5–6, hands-on multi-node demos. Claim: BEAM gives rapid prototyping of microservices, leader‑worker, P2P and pipelines; tools used include lightweight processes, message passing and supervision trees enabling the let it crash approach. Change to Elixir (2018–19) improves onboarding; industry signals (Phoenix growth, survey rankings) boost student motivation.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:1512-year BEAM experiment
- 8:50Software architecture at UDC
- 13:31Course objectives and structure
- 18:05Erlang and FP for prototyping
- 20:32Elixir transition in course
- 26:18Elixir improvements
- 30:19Why BEAM for prototyping
- 37:26BEAM and distributed systems
- 38:08Industry adoption and student motivation
- 43:55Final takeaways and conclusion
