Haskell Hackathon, Haskell eXchange, Haskell courses in London, October 2015

Friday, 11 September 2015, by Andres Löh.
Filed under well-typed, community, training.

Haskell events in London

In the time from 5–13 October, we are (co-)organizing a number of Haskell-related events in London, with Skills Matter.

Here’s the overview:

5–6 October 2015: 2-day intro course Fast Track to Haskell
7 October 2015: 1-day course Guide to the Haskell Type System
8–9 October 2015: 2-day conference Haskell eXchange
10–11 October 2015: 2-day free Haskell infrastructure hackathon
12–13 October 2015: 2-day course Advanced Haskell

Haskell infrastructure Hackathon

We’ll co-organize and participate in a two-day Haskell Hackathon, which takes place directly after the Haskell eXchange.

This Hackathon aims at bringing together Haskell developers – both beginners and experts – who want to help improve the Haskell infrastructure, predominantly Hackage and Cabal.

We’ll aim to arrange some introductory overview talks, to e.g. provide an overview over the code bases and the most important open issues.

Participation is free, but please register via Skills Matter.

Haskell eXchange

The Haskell eXchange 2015 will be bigger than ever before. Expanded to two days and two tracks, it features four keynotes, two tutorials, and more than twenty speakers in total.

Here’s the preliminary list of speakers and topics:

Keynote by Simon Peyton Jones on “Into the Core: understanding GHC’s intermediate language”
Keynote by Lennart Augustsson on “Giving Types to Relations”
Keynote by Simon Marlow on “Fun with Haxl”
Keynote by Luite Stegeman on “Solving the JavaScript Problem”
Workshop by Tom Ellis on “Opaleye”
Workshop by Ivan Perez on “Game programming for fun and profit”
Talk by Jasper van der Jeugt on “The Ludwig DSL”
Talk by Gershom Bazerman on “Programming with Universal Properties”
Talk by Neil Mitchell on “Shake”
Talk by Johan Tibell on “High-performance Haskell”
Talk by Francesco Mazzoli on “inline-c”
Talk by Matthew Pickering on “ghc-exactprint”
Talk by Alp Mestanogullari on “Servant”
Talk by Alfredo di Napoli on “Using Haskell at Iris Connect”
Talk by Miëtek Bak on “Building your own proof assistant”
Talk by Lars Hupel and Miles Sabin on “What Haskell can learn from Scala”
Talk by Vladimir Kirillov on “Haskell goes Devops”
Talk by Nicolas Wu on “Transformers: handlers in disguise”
Short talk by Martijn van Steenbergen on “JsonGrammar”
Short talk by Bodil Stokke on “PureScript”
Short talk by Blair Archibald on “HdpH”
Short talk by Philipp Kant on “Data avoidance in Haskell”
Short talk by Andraž Bajt on “Using Haskell as a thinking tool”
Short talk by San Gillis on “Haskell development with Docker”

Registration is possible via Skills Matter. The promo code HASKELL-EXCHANGE-25 (has been extended to be valid until September 19!) can be used to get a 25% reduction.

Haskell courses

In connection with the Haskell eXchange and the Haskell infrastructure hackathon, Well-Typed are offering courses with Skills Matter. If you cannot come to London in October, but are interested in our course offerings, see Training for more information.

Fast Track to Haskell

The Fast Track course is a two-day compact introduction to Haskell, assuming previous programming experience, but no familiarity with Haskell or functional programming. It covers topics such as defining datatypes and functions, higher-order functions, explicit side effects and monads.

Guide to the Haskell Type System

The Guide to the Haskell Type System course is a one-day introduction to various type-system extensions that GHC offers, such as GADTs, rank-n polymorphism, type families and more. It assumes familiarity with Haskell. It does not make use of any other advanced Haskell concepts except for the ones it introduces, so it is in principle possible to follow this course directly after Fast Track. However, as this course focuses very much on the extreme aspects of Haskell’s type system, it should probably only be taken by participants who are enthusiastic about static types and perhaps familiar with a strong static type system from another language.

Advanced Haskell

The Advanced Haskell course is targeted at Haskellers who are comfortable with the Haskell basics, and want to learn more about how to write larger Haskell programs. The course covers topics such as data structures, their complexity, pitfalls of lazy evaluation, profiling, GHC’s internal core language, and some more advanced design patterns such as monad transformers and how to use them effectively. Once again, strictly speaking this course can be followed when just having completed Fast Track. But the nature of this course’s contents also means that several of the topics can be more appreciated if one has written more Haskell code in practice already.