I loved his how to reverse a list video I think it captures his personality and approach to problem solving perfectly.
Here’s one I posted not long ago - his thoughts on the benefits of Erlang’s ‘term_to_binary’:
Databases are basically rectangular tables of cells, where the cells contain very simple types like strings and integers - every time you access a row of an external database this list of cells has to be converted to beam internal data structures - this conversion is extremely expensive.
The best way to persist data is in a process - then no conversion is needed, but this is not fault tolerant - so you need to keep a trail of updates to the data and store this on disk.
Often you don’t need a database for example you might like to have a system where you store all the user data as in the file system with “one file per user” this will scale very nicely - just move the files to a new machine if you need more capacity.
Erlang has two primitives term_to_binary and the inverse binary_to_term that serialise any term and reconstruct it - so storing complex terms on disk is really easy.
I have mixed feelings about databases, they are great for aggregate operations (for example, find all users that have these attributes) but terrible for operations on individual users (where a single file per user is far better).
If I were designing a new system I’d go for ‘one file per user’ as much as possible and try to limit databases for operations over all users.
From: Acceptance of Erlang's 'term_to_binary' and vice versa in Elixir
