GRiSP 2 – Erlang and Elixir on bare metal
In this technical retrospective (2019), @lelf shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 223 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 38 comments
Love the bookshelf in the background of Peer Stritzinger's video feed. FreeBSD, UNIX, and a huge row of O'Reilly books on the bottom shelf! I think O'Reilly are some of the best, most thoroughly reviewed technical books out there, I always choose O'Reilly if the topic exists as they seem to vet their authors quite well and make sure they have competent subject matter experts actually write and review the books!
#phsycialbooks #FTW
This is neat, I would have loved to see this a few years ago when I was working on a touchpad dimmer that I used Erlang on (the hardware was originally designed to run Linux so it was easy to put Erlang on there but having a lower-cost solution by not requiring Linux would've been great).
Erlang's remote RPC, high-quality CRDT libraries, and hot-code loading made it an incredible technology for implementing IoT software product features.
This is great! I haven't tried the boards (yet) but it's difficult to find good industrial ready boards out there. Combine that with the difficulty of handling precise & consistent timing below 1 ms in Linux then these boards are a real gem!
I wonder if this will support Joxa or Lisp-Flavored-Erlang. Those are pretty much all I use on the Erlang VM nowadays, and I would love to get more into embedded stuff.
This is really cool. You can find out more about the project at https://grisp.org