Niclas Axelsson is an Erlang engineer with deep practical experience in building reliable, concurrent systems on the BEAM. He cares about making Erlang web development feel as straightforward and productive as it does in Elixir or Python—clean tooling, clear conventions, and a developer experience that helps you ship fast without sacrificing robustness.
Outside of software, he’s also a furniture maker: a hands-on craftsman who thinks in joinery, proportions, and materials as naturally as he thinks in processes and message passing. Born in the forests of Värmland, Sweden, he brings that grounded, cheerful Värmland energy into everything he builds—whether it’s an OTP system or a cabinet.
Erlang is known for telecom systems, distributed databases, and extreme fault tolerance.
But simple web apps? Not really. In this talk, we challenge the idea that building web applications in Erlang is complicated or overly academic. Using Nova, we’ll show how straightforward it can be to build a modern web app — with routing, templates, and JSON APIs — without fighting the framework or drowning in OTP abstractions.
Then we’ll look at what makes Erlang fundamentally different from most web platforms: every request runs in its own lightweight process. Crashes are isolated. Concurrency is the default. Fault tolerance isn’t bolted on — it’s the foundation.
Just processes, isolation, and supervision. If you’ve ever felt that web development on the BEAM is “too much OTP” or too heavy for everyday applications, this talk aims to change your perspective. Web apps in Erlang are not only possible. They’re actually simple.
Talk objectives:
Target audience: