Concurrency-related bugs, such as race conditions and deadlocks, are some of the hardest bugs to isolate, reproduce, understand and fix. Even Erlang programs can suffer from such bugs, for example when messages arrive in unexpected orders or shared resources (e.g. ETS tables) are accessed concurrently. In this workshop I will demonstrate how developers of all levels can use Concuerror, a testing and verification tool for Erlang programs, to automatically detect, isolate and understand concurrency-related errors in their code and explain how the tool can ultimately prove the absence of such errors. I'll also share experiences from two industrial applications of Concuerror in verifying interesting aspects of distributed algorithms.

"Are there really companies that use Erlang?" is the most common (and by now expected) question I have been asked by my peers ever since I joined the Erlang Solutions office in Stockholm, not too long ago. "Why?" is, naturally, the second question. In this introductory workshop I will explain what are the key ideas that Erlang is built upon, how these ideas have evolved into a powerful set of design patterns that compose the Erlang/OTP framework and why these ideas and patterns are useful to plenty of industries that use Erlang (and not merely to telecom!). I will also introduce the language ecosystem that has evolved around Erlang, including languages such as Elixir, LFE, and Alpaca.