At the Erlang User Conference in Stockholm, I received the thirteenth "Erlang User of the Year" award, and was presented with the traditional gift, a beautiful hand-carved Erlang logo made in wood by Kanevad in Gamla Linköping.
I have to admit that I did not even know this award existed, but I am honored to join the ranks of Chris Piro and Eugene Letuchy (Facebook chat, 2009), Damien Katz (CouchDB, 2008), John Hughes (QuickCheck, 2007), Alexey Shchepin (ejabberd, 2006), The HiPE team members 2005, Michaël Rémond (ejabberd, 2004).
The award is given by the Erlang community for technical contribution; in this case my work on Erjang - A JVM-based Erlang VM. I was quite surprised (pleasantly of course) by this since I am by no stretch an Erlang old-timer. I wrote my first line of Erlang code a little over a year ago during JAOO 2009 when Francesco Cesarini was giving an Erlang tutorial.
The Erjang project is doing really well. For many systems, Erjang is roughly twice as fast as Open Source Erlang (BEAM). Recently, we've been working on completing more of the core functionality, and we're already at a level where we can boot and run complex systems like Riak and RabbitMQ.
Since I did not really have time to prepare an acceptance speech, I'm sorry I did not get around to thanking all the people that have been supporting this project. Most importantly I should thank Erik Søe Sørensen, who was the first guy to stand up and contribute code to this lunatic project, my family (for living with my lunacy on a daily basis for a year now), and also the entire Erlang community for being surprisingly helpful and positive to this (literally) bastard project.
Once again, Thank you all!
Kresten Krab Thorup
