In his search to find better ways to implement fault-tolerant applications, Joe Armstrong designed and implemented the first version of Erlang in 1986. He wrote the first Erlang book and held the first Erlang course—he has worked with Erlang from the very beginning. He has taught Erlang to hundreds of programmers and held countless lectures and keynotes describing the technology.

Joe has a PhD in computer science from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden and is an expert in the construction of fault tolerant systems. Joe was the chief software architect of the project which produced the Erlang OTP system. He has worked as an entrepreneur in one of the first Erlang startups (Bluetail) and has worked for 30 years in industry and research.

Joe currently works for Ericsson AB where Erlang is used to build highly-fault tolerant switching systems.