Virtual Machines and Where to Find Them

Viua VM is a greenfield virtual machine designed for parallel execution. Its instruction set aims to facilitate writing reliable, correct, concurrent software. Such an undertaking is not completed in a day or two - work on Viua started in December 2014, and is still ongoing. Viua positions itself as a contender to the throne currently occupied by Erlang's VM - BEAM. Apart from a technical overview, this talk will give a tour of the "softer" problems one may encounter while working on a piece of non-trivial Free Software. It will also discuss how work on such software may affect one's position in the academia and in the business world. This will be described from an undergraduate student's point of view, early in their carreer.