Community

Posts about getting involved in the software development community

Community Calendar – IndySA – September 18

IndySA is on a roll with great speakers. This month, Phil Japikse will lead the group in an interactive workshop covering user story mapping. If you want to improve your user story organization and prioritization skills, you won’t want to miss this one as Phil will guide the group through creating a user map, clearly defining order, minimal marketing features, and release plans.

I’ve been fortunate to attend a number of Phil’s previous talks and had have always learned something. You can register and find full logistics information by following the link below.

Register Here

I hope to see you there!

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IndyMobileDev Needs Your Help

The Indianapolis Mobile [.NET] Developers Meetup group needs your help. We’ve received a number of interesting topic submissions including TypeScript, Responsive Design, and Single Sign-On. Rather than arbitrarily selecting topics, we’ve put together a short survey to help us gauge interest in each of the submitted topics. If you could take a moment to complete the survey, you’ll help us prioritize topics for future meetings and ensure that the group continues to be a valuable resource for the community we serve.

TAKE THE SURVEY

Thank you for your time.

My Next Language – Results

Last week I asked my social media network to help choose my destiny by suggesting which language I should study next. In all, I received 15 responses. Thanks to everyone that contributed to this.

When I put the survey together I hadn’t completely decided how I’d select a winner. Would I select based on the number of votes or would there be a really compelling reason to select something with only a single vote? After inspecting the responses, it looks like Haskell is the clear winner. To be honest, I was really hoping to get more votes and reasons for Erlang but it’s really hard to ignore the fact that Haskell received a third of the votes. What really surprised me was the number of “Other” votes and the languages that were suggested.

For those interested, I’ve listed the results along with comments below. Now to find some time to start studying Haskell!

Results

Language Survey Results

Haskell

  • Pure functional is a natural next step after mostly functional F#
  • Going from Haskell to F# is frustrating. But the other way around is actually compelling
  • Typeclasses/-kinds, purity, better type inference and pattern matching, higher-kinded/ranked polymorphism, lean syntax.

Other

  • Rust – Speed of C, but more safe. Language is still under development, so you could go 2/2 on being a hipster.
  • Idris/Coq/Agda – Dependent types
  • Elixir – Erlang on steroids/for the masses.
  • Rebol – Rich built-in types, homoiconicity, consistency, cross-platform, small, zero-install just download and run, super easy GUI development built-in (at least Rebol 2.7..) and then you can write a book on it too!

Python

  • Market demand
  • Popular choice among UNIX crowd, has a .NET implementation, can show how people unfamiliar with .net interact with windows with it.

Erlang

  • Immutable by default
  • Let it fail thinking vs catch-all errors
  • Functional

Ruby

  • Ignore the rails stuff, ruby is a wonderful language with a lot of interesting features (modules, execution model, monkey patching aka nothing is closed, blocks).

R

  • No comments

Help me choose my next programming language

After spending so much time with F# and most recently, TypeScript, I want to continue expanding my horizons. There are a number of languages I’d like to learn, each with their own pros and cons, but because this exercise is mostly academic, I’m torn on which direction to go. That’s where you come in.

I’ve put together a very quick survey to help focus and aggregate responses. Can you take a moment to help me decide which language to study next?

Take the survey

Thank you for your time and help!

Community Calendar – IndySA – July 17

This morning I awoke to some great news. David Giard is coming to Carmel to present “Effective Data Visualization” at the IndySA meeting on July 17!

I had the opportunity to hear an early incarnation of this talk a while back and I can only imagine how it has been refined since then.

If data visualization is something that interests you or you just want to hear a great speaker, you won’t want to miss this event. The doors open at 5:30 with the meeting starting at 6:00. Full logistics details are available on the IndySA Meetup page.

I hope to see you there!

Upcoming Event: Iowa Code Camp

I’m excited to have been selected to speak at Iowa Code Camp on July 19th. The organizers have put together what should be a great event with some really strong speakers.

I’ll be speaking about – you guessed it – F#! This is my introductory talk, Breaking Free with Managed Functional Programming, so if you’re in the area and want to learn my F# is getting so much attention, be sure to stop in.

Breaking Free at IndyMobileDev

On June 3, I presented Break Free with Managed Functional Programming: an Introduction to F# at the Indianapolis Mobile .NET Developers group. Brad Pillow was kind enough to record the entire presentation and post it to YouTube. The slides are a bit hard read in the video but I’ve posted them to SlideShare (and embedded them below the video) so you can follow along.

Enjoy!

IndyMobileDev – June 3

On Tuesday, 3 June, I’ll be presenting Break Free with Managed Functional Programming: An Introduction to F# at the Indianapolis Mobile .NET Developers meeting. The meeting is held at Launch Fishers and begins at 7:00 PM. Immediately following my talk, Brad Pillow will showcase how F# fits into mobile development using Xamarin Studio. You can find full logistics details and a registration link on the group’s meetup page.

It should be a fun evening and I hope to see you there!

Welcome, Kevin Miller!

My good friend and technical reviewer for The Book of F#, Kevin Miller, has recently started blogging over at structuredsight.com! Much of his day-to-day work involves managing build, deployment, and migration processes, so he’s primarily writing about some of the challenges he’s faced with migrating multiple SQL Server instances and query optimizations, but he also has some fun articles comparing programming languages, too.

Please take a moment and welcome Kevin to the party. I know he’d love to hear from you.

.NET Users of Fort Wayne – March 19

To celebrate the release of my new book, The Book of F#, I’ll be back in Fort Wayne, IN to talk to NUFW on March 19. Instead of the usual technical talk, this will be an open-ended discussion of my experiences writing a technical book but I’m sure that F# will find its way into the conversation at least a few times.

If you’re in the Fort Wayne area and would like to join us, we’ll be meeting at the Cole Foundation Conference and Training Center (3213 Stellhorn Rd) at 6:00 PM. I’ll be giving out a few copies of the book as door prizes so you won’t want to miss this!