Mike Williams

After leaving school in Wales, Milke worked as a school teacher in Malawi. He wasn’t a very good teacher, so he returned to Cambridge where he completed an engineering degree. He moved to Stockholm (with his Swedish wife) where he got a job working for Ericsson, the telecommunications giant. He had many jobs at Ericsson, starting as a hardware developer making him one of the few people who to design and implemented a computer from basic chips! Having developed a computer, the next stage was to program it, so he slipped into software development, eventually co-founding the Ericsson Computer Science laboratory. His principle achievement as co-inventor of Erlang was the implementation of the first Erlang virtual machine and the error handling constructs in Erlang's concurrency model. From applied research, he slipped into management of both small and large business units which developed and maintained software, both in Erlang and other technologies. Building and managing good teams for software development is, perhaps, the most important aspect for any non trivial development. It is what he is going to speak about.