Gleam-team:
Building Massive Backends with Beam Power and NATS Magic

Imagine running backends so big they could handle McDonalds orders, sync Philips Hue devices, or connect millions of Biamp devices globally in real time … WITHOUT the usual backend headaches.

The Big Idea

Let’s play with some cool new tech and push it to scale. Imagine running backends so big and gnarly they could handle McDonalds orders, sync smart homes like Philips Hue, or keep millions of audio devices (think Biamp) connected globally in real time…

…all without the usual backend headaches.

The secret sauce?

• NATS – blazing fast, globally distributed messaging.

• BEAM VM – legendary for orchestrating millions of concurrent processes.

• Gleam – a shiny, new, strongly typed functional language that runs on BEAM and makes your code feel like poetry ✨.

Why This Is a Game-Changer

• ⚡ Vertical Scaling Superpowers – BEAM spawns millions of lightweight processes on a single machine like it’s nothing.

• 🌍 Horizontal Scaling Made Simple – NATS magically stitches together BEAM nodes across data centers, regions, even different cloud providers.

• 🛠️ Zero-Config, Zero Headaches – Forget load balancers, connection pools, or waking up at 3 AM to debug distributed state. Just plug it in and go

Hackaton Task

We’ll attempt to implement a NATS client in Gleam. For fun and learning. And then use it to demonstrate a multi-regional zero configuration autoscaling backend.

We’ve already got some pretty cool visualizations going for how the load spreads across the globe. The Hackathon will focus on learning the powers of Gleam and BEAM while we build the actual Job managers and workers.