At this conference, we're surrounded by the word "BEAM". A quick exploration will reveal it has to do with how Erlang code is executed and is the secret sauce uniting all of us - Erlang, Elixir, LFE, Efene and others. But do you really know what it is? In this talk, Michal will carefully explore the BEAM, both the runtime and the compiler. We'll see how they relate, what particular strengths this gives to our code and how we can leverage it from the applications we write every day in Erlang and Elixir. Finally, we'll see how the BEAM is similar and different to other environments and languages like Java's JVM, C#'s CLR or Lua.