Poorman's gen_server
summary
A talk traces evolving a hand-rolled Erlang TCP server from a simple recursive-loop state through records and maps, adding helper message APIs and random refs for request/response matching and using monitors and try/catch for robustness. The implementation is pushed to production but proves brittle and untested, leading to a refactor into an OTP-style gen_server module with proper file-descriptor cleanup and supervision trees, which exposes gaps in tooling, monitoring and testing that motivate adopting OTP.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Start gen_server
- 1:13First TCP server
- 4:07State in processes
- 6:39Process communication
- 9:28Process liveness
- 12:43Fetching server values
- 14:09Out-of-order messages
- 17:21Random ID solution
- 19:50Unexpected messages
- 20:32Proper termination
- 23:03Try-catch usage
- 24:27Reducing repetition
- 25:53Supervision trees
- 28:43Logic separation
- 30:51OTP benefits
- 31:35Q&A
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