Redistributing Our Systems. Erlang's Enduring Lessons for Local-First

Erlang was designed for reliability in telephone switches, but its core principles — isolated processes, message passing, “let it crash supervision — anticipated problems we’re only now grappling with at scale. Four decades later, these ideas are finding new expression in local-first software: apps that work offline, sync peer-to-peer, and put users back in control of their data.In this podcast, Robert Virding (Erlang co-creator) and Brooke Zelenka trace the intellectual lineage from telecom switches to CRDTs and capabilities. They’ll explore how Erlang’s fault-tolerance model maps onto modern challenges, distributed security, and systems that continue to work offline. The cloud promised to simplify distributed systems; instead concentrated in a handful of companies; perhaps the answers we need were hiding in a language designed for phone switches all along.