NAME
Nelson Vides – Programmer, Historian
SYNOPSIS
nelson [--language erlang|elixir]
nelson --role programmer
nelson --interest mathematics|history
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DESCRIPTION
I'm a child of a multicultural journey. Born in Venezuela, raised in Spain, I dropped out of a maths degree and cycled to Poland in 2015 — a trip I wrote about at length on farfromready.com. In Poland I took a job I didn't like and discovered that writing programs to automate the tedium was more fun than the job itself. A maths background made functional programming feel like a natural language, but I was obsessed with squeezing every cycle out of the machine, so I started with C. Concurrency in C and a love for mathematical abstractions eventually led me to Erlang, where both obsessions coexist. These days I write DNS infrastructure at DNSimple, where the problems that keep me up are the ones I care about most: serving as many queries as fast as possible, and never going down.
When I'm not programming, I read history. Not just as a hobby — as a way of thinking. The same instinct that makes me want to understand how a system fails makes me want to understand how civilisations do.
PROJECTS
erldns
Authoritative DNS Server
The DNS server I maintain at DNSimple. I rewrote its core to handle millions of QPS and survive any DDoS attacks — which became the subject of most of my conference talks.
View on GitHub →dns_erlang
Erlang DNS parsing library
The packet parser underneath erldns. DNS looks simple until you handle every supported record known, DNSSEC algorithms, EDNS0 extensions, TSIG authentication, and every malformed packet the internet throws at you. I've spent more time than I'd admit optimising bit-level parsing.
View on GitHub →AMOC – A Murder of Crows
Load Testing Framework
Born out of the need to stress-test services with millions of simultaneous sessions. Each simulated user is an Erlang process — the actor model turns out to be the perfect model for load. The name is accurate — a murder of crows descending on your infrastructure.
View on GitHub →SPEAKING
FOSDEM 2026
Feb 2026Anatomy of a Resilient Nameserver: Concurrency, Resolution, and Protection
Lambda Days 2024
May 2024Automata Unveiled: A Theoretical Exploration of State Machines
ARTICLES
Building a Resilient Authoritative Nameserver
Feb 2026Announcing erldns v10, the authoritative erlang DNS server with CoDel queue management and improved congestion control.
Read Article →Balancing Innovation and Technical Debt
May 2024Technical Debt has an inherent value akin to Financial Debt. Choosing the right tool for the job means acquiring the right Technical Debt when needed – leveraging strategies, partnerships, and solutions, that prioritise resilience, agility, and long-term sustainability.
Read Article →gen_statem Unveiled
Mar 2024This blog post is a deep dive into some of the concepts discussed in my recent conference talk at FOSDEM. The presentation explored some basic theoretical concepts of Finite State Machines, and some special powers of Erlang's gen_statem in the context of protocols and event-driven development, and building upon this insight, this post delves into harnessing the capabilities of the gen_statem behaviour. Let's jump straight into it!
Read Article →In Defence Of Stanisław, the Last King Of Poland
Sept 2020Raise thy hand thee who hath bear no guilt of delusion. As much as our human mind might naturally tend to laze around, we cannot forget us able to disentangle complexity. I argue, we must.
Read Article →SEE ALSO
AUTHOR
Written by Nelson Vides.
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