How Did Anthony Eden Turn a Perl Alias Script Into an Erlang Name Server So a Naked Domain Could Point at Heroku?

DNSimple customers could not put a CNAME on the apex of a domain such as dnsimple.com. A Heroku customer wanted the naked domain to point at a Heroku site. The alias record started as a Perl script running inside PowerDNS, with a MySQL backend, and it worked until growth made it stop scaling.

Lua and another attempt did not fit. Anthony Eden learned Erlang to solve the scaling problem, using a library that already parsed packets, and built the name server DNSimple still runs in production. The language was learned to fix that problem inside DNSimple, not to start the company.