In the beginning of October, my colleage Adam Gundry and I will spend a full week in London again for Haskell-related activities: on Monday and Tuesday (October 6–7), we will teach Fast Track to Haskell, a two-day introduction course to Haskell, targeted at people who want to get started with Haskell or learn more about functional programming in general. On Wednesday (October 8), there’s the Haskell eXchange, a one-day conference full of interesting talks on Haskell-related topics. On Thursday and Friday (October 9–10), we will look at more advanced Haskell concepts and programming patterns in Advanced Haskell.
All three events are still open for registration.
Haskell eXchange
The Haskell eXchange will take place in London for the third time now, and I’m happy to report that there’s going to be a really fantastic program again:
As is almost traditional by now, Simon Peyton Jones (Microsoft Research) himself will open the conference, this time with a talk on “Safe, zero-cost coercions in Haskell”.
This is followed by Jeremy Gibbons (University of Oxford) with “Categories for the Working Haskeller”, explaining to Haskell developers and people who are interested in Haskell what role category theory plays in Haskell and if/how categories can be helpful.
I’m very pleased that Bryan O’Sullivan (Facebook) has agreed to give a presentation at the Haskell eXchange this year. As the author of countless Haskell libraries (many of which are among the most used in the entire Haskell ecosystem), and being a co-author of the widely known O’Reilly book “Real World Haskell”, he’s certainly learned how to squeeze a bit of extra performance out of Haskell code when needed. He’s going to share his experiences and provide valuable advice in his talk.
After lunch, we’ll continue with a pair of talks looking at using Haskell for
the development of RESTful web services from slightly different angles. Erik
Hesselink (Silk) is going to present the rest framework, which makes it easy
to develop and maintain REST APIs, independent of the underlying web framework
you use. After that, Chris Dornan (Iris Connect) and Adam Gundry (Well-Typed)
will talk about api-tools and in particular address the question of how you
can solve the problem of schema migrations nicely.
Tim Williams and Peter Marks (both Barclays) will give a joint talk on Lucid, their in-house non-embedded DSL that is written in Haskell and has a mostly structural type system with interesting features such as row polymorphism and extensible records as well as extensible sum-types.
The talks will be concluded by Oliver Charles (Fynder), well-known for his tireless efforts in the “24 days of Hackage” series, who is going to show us how the use of GHC’s most advanced type system extensions helps him write better real-world code at his company.
After the talks, there’s going to be pizza and beer and an informal “Park Bench Discussion” where we can all discuss the questions that have been raised throughout the day in more detail.
I hope you’re as excited about this program as I am: I think there’s a fantastic range of topics covered, from language features and theoretical aspects, practical advice for programmers to interesting case studies of real-world code. Also, it’s an excellent opportunity to meet fellow developers interested in Haskell. If you’re working for a company using Haskell and are looking for new developers, this may be an excellent opportunity to recruit. On the other hand, if you’d like nothing more than a Haskell job, this is an opportunity to meet people who are actually using it in practice, and may have a job for you or at least be able to give you advice on how to find one.
If you haven’t registered yet, please consider doing so! We’re looking forward to meeting you there.
Fast Track to Haskell and Advanced Haskell
These two successful courses have been offered on a regular basis since October 2012. They’re continuously updated to reflect the latest changes in the Haskell world, such as updates to the infrastructure, new features of the main Haskell compiler GHC, or exciting new libraries.
Both courses are hands-on, comprising a combination of lectures, interactive coding and exercises that the participants are supposed to work on alone or in teams, with the help of the teacher(s).
The Fast Track course is for people who know how to program, but have little or no experience in Functional Programming or Haskell. It teaches Haskell in from scratch in just two days, covering important concepts such as datatypes, polymorphism, higher-order functions, type classes, how IO works in Haskell, and ending with an introduction to monads. It’s also interesting for people who are interested in learning about functional programming in general, because Haskell is a prime example of a functional programming language, and the course focuses on the important programming concepts more than on language peculiarities.
The Advanced Haskell course is for people who have some experience with Haskell, but want to learn more. We’re going to discuss (functional) data structures and their complexity, have a detailed look at how lazy evaluation works and how it is implemented, how to reason about performance and how to use various debugging tools. Somewhat depending on demand, there’s also the option to learn more about advanced programming patterns, such as monads, applicative functors and monad transformers, about concurrency and parallelism, or about the more advanced features of the Haskell type system such as GADTs and type families.
Being in the same week as the Haskell eXchange makes it possible to combine one of the courses (or even both) with the eXchange, where you can hear several other viewpoints and get to know more Haskellers!
Other courses
We’re offering additional training courses on-demand and on-site for companies in Europe, the US, or anywhere in the world on request. See our training page for more information.
HacBerlin
By the way, I’m also going to be at the Haskell Hackathon in Berlin this upcoming weekend. On Sunday, I’m going to give a talk on parser combinators. You can still register for the Hackathon, too. It’s free.