Modern solutions must be designed resiliently to enable service provisioning during incidents. There are multiple solutions to develop high-available and reliable services that can be applied to various levels in a system’s architecture and design. Some programming languages are specifically designed to meet these challenges. The functional programming language Erlang provides inherent functionality to develop these resilient services. Therefore, this article presents the exemplary design and development of a communication service based on the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol in Erlang to investigate its availability features.

Learn how to use the Mastodon social network platform from the comfort of your regular IRC client. When it comes to sending text between people, I've found IRC (in particular, a text-based IRC client) works best. I've been using it to chat for decades while other chat protocols and clients come and go. When my friends have picked other chat clients through the years, I've used the amazing IRC gateway Bitlbee to connect with them on their chat client using the same IRC interface I've always used. Bitlbee provides an IRC gateway to many different chat protocols, so you can connect to Bitlbee using your IRC client, and it will handle any translation necessary to connect you to the remote chat clients it supports. I've written about Bitlbee a number of times in the past, and I've used it to connect to other instant messengers, Twitter and Slack. In this article, I describe how I use it to connect to yet another service on the internet: Mastodon.

Find out how to reconnect to Slack over IRC using a Bitlbee libpurple plugin.

In my discussion on IRC with "bkidwell" (see the Non-Linux FOSS article for more on our talk), we were discussing how we connect to IRC. My main method is to SSH in to my co-located Raspberry Pi in Austria and connect to a screen session I have running that is constantly connected to IRC with Irssi. This works really well for me, and I never miss messages when I'm away.

It may not be fair to call Weechat the little brother of Irssi, but in my short introduction to it, that's what it felt like. If Weechat didn't seem quite as powerful as Irssi to me, I definitely can say that it is better-looking out of the box. So, little brother has one thing going for him!