Erlang's process-oriented approach has given it a very different runtime environment. As Erlang and tools built on Erlang, like CouchDB, Riak, and EjabberD spread, understanding those underpinnings becomes much more important for people building and maintaining applications. This book will explore Erlang's unique approach to building a virtual machine, demonstrating how to take advantage of its power and tune it to fit your needs.

Erik Happi Stenman has been programming for fun since 1980, and for profit since 1989 when he started his first company. He received his Master of Science in Computer Science in 1996 from Uppsala University. Erik was one of the driving forces behind the the High Performance Erlang project (HiPE). In 2002 he received a Ph.D. for his work on native code compilation of Erlang. During his post-doc as a project manager in Martin Odersky’s Scala group he helped bringing the project to a successful release of Scala 1.0. Before joining Klarna (then Kreditor) he worked at Virtutech with low-level optimizations of Virtutech Simics.

As ”Head of Development”, CTO and “Chief Scientist” at Klarna Erik was responsible for the development and operation of “Klarna Online”, a system providing creative payment solutions to Internet shops. He also built up the Engineering Department at Klarna from the start, and from 1 to about 80 people.

Currently (2014) Erik is writing a book about the Erlang Runtime system, and building a company where software developers, aka hackers, love to work.