Paweł graduated from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland, and followed his studies with a doctorate in the field of natural language processing. He started programming in Erlang in 2007, and worked for Klarna AB (Stockholm, Sweden) for a few years, developing fintech solutions. In 2012 he joined Erlang Solutions Ltd., where he’s had the opportunity to design, implement and optimize highly scalable Erlang systems, finally becoming the lead of the MongooseIM messaging platform team.
An extensible protocol implementation means that its core code has to be extensible, right? But it also means the core is the first piece of code ever written for this project, and which everything else will depend on, which means, well, highly likely future technical debt. Fast-forward over a decade, and this code might have become not just intractable, but also impossible to understand. What’s next? Incremental improvements, top-bottom or bottom-up, a full rewrite and replug, experiment with a mysterious and not fully tested spaghetti? In our chat’s backend service, we kept coming back to this topic, until one day that looked like it’d be just a boring day, we came up with a prototype for a remorseless full rewrite that immediately looked promising. Based on the OTP’s gen_statem behaviour, we wrote a new core set of extensible rules where everything can gracefully plug in. Let’s solve the quagmire putting together old code, RFCs, state machines and a telemetry-like event mechanism.
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