Me too. But I didn’t have deeper things to say that wasn’t covered by Learn You Some Erlang and the AppSignal guide.

Best part of this post is what it lured out in the hacker news comments. Love when a Discord dev pops up.

Nice to see a bunch of peoole using it.

If you want a deeper look at it Bryan Hunter’s first episode on BEAM Radio “Punking the Servers” and his 2023 talk at GigCity Elixir were both fascinating. Not code-level typically but a fair amount of detail. I think the HCA talk at Code BEAM NYC was a deeper look but it isn’t out yet.

Happy to read people actually using hot code re/loading in the article’s comments on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42187761

We used hot code reloading in production occasionally at my previous position. We only used it when things were dire, because we were nervous something bad might happen, but it never did. It worked every single time.

It was mainly useful if something went out slightly broken, a missing where clause or a faulty comparison, a team member needed a tweak in validation to finish onboarding a customer, or if we just desperately needed an extra log message. Or maybe the CI job was not working or Kafka was looping on a single malformed event and crashing, causing a backup.

Check out the current tag, modify that module, run a script that would upload that file to each k8s pod and run a Code.compile on it. Worked every time, just takes a couple seconds. Then get code committed and the next deploy would have that code. We never had to modify state.