I am pleased and honored to announce that I will be a speaker at this years F# eXchange 2017 conference.

F# Community

It’s almost 3 years ago since I became acquainted with Skills Matter and the F# Community. I had spoken previously with Phillip Trelford because I have co-founded the F#unctional Copenhageners Meetup Group, which is like a sisterhood to F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group. In another case, due to work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, I had come across Ross McKinlay (I still owe you some beers). Both were present at the Meetup.

When I arrived to the venue, I bumped into Don Syme at the door. I was really not expecting that. Rob Lyndon talk started and I was amazed how this punk rocker, with a Mohawk, looking guy absolutely mastered coding GPU kernels type-safely in F#. It was pretty amazing.

After the Meetup, we all went over and had a beer (or many) at a near bar. This was great as it gave the possibility to meet many of the people who did incredible work for the Community. I specially noticed Tomas Petricek, due to the amazing tools that he has provided and which I have used have used professionally: F# Formatting, F# Data, among others.

I think it was the night that The Don agreed to give a talk at MF#K as he would be in Copenhagen due to some ICFP related work. His talk is still one of the most attended and I would argue that it was the cornerstone to the foundation of our Meetup group when we are about to reach 700 members where the next upcoming talk we are hosting, will be having 2 × F# MVPs on stage.

Time has passed, and MF#K have hosted a variety of functional programming languages talks, most of them F# related, and I have personally given around a dozen of F# talks and some 1-day courses. I recently held my very first international abroad talk in Sweden (Malmö) to restart SweNUG, the Swedish .NET User Group, and my very last talk might derive in a an official F# project.

Note: Oskar, sorry for not being able to work on the project at the moment.

F# eXchange 2017 Conference

That’s why I write that I am honored to give a little back to F# Community which have given me so much.

In addition to greet old acquaintances, I am really pleased and looking forward to the strong program that has been put together:

  • I had the pleasure to see this year’s Conference Keynote, Evelina, at NDC London last year. She is an incredibly facilitator that captures the attention of everyone attending the talk. Besides her unquestionable knowledge, she is also very hands on, key component that many forget when giving a talk. It also helps that she chooses topics which seems interesting for most of us.

  • Scott Wlaschin is without any doubt, one of my favorite people in the F# community. He has one of the best learning sources, if not the best, he an incredible communicator who is able to teach very complex theory with analogies that most understand. Just an example Railway Oriented Programming.

  • I’m really looking forward to meet Michael Newton. I Have read time and time again his blog post on the subject of Type Providers and learned a lot from them, to the degree that it helped immensely to create one professionally DAXIF. Now, I can finally put a face to the blog.

  • Last but not least, my fellow paisano Alfonso Garcia-Caro who in collaboration with ncave have made a fantastic job on Fable. Really looking forward to his talk and maybe some discussion with regard of the Motherland over a few beers.

To all the speakers I do not mention, it’s because I do not know your work but I am really looking forward to your talks !!!

The only cons I have noticed so far with regard of the conference is that there are some cases where I would really like to see both talks scheduled at the same time. But I guess that’s what happens when a conference starts getting bigger. Kudos Skills Matter.

Here is the title and abstract of my talk. I hope you will enjoy it and hopefully, nobody will be disappointed:

Puritas, A journey of a thousand miles towards side-effect free code

Puritas, from Latin, means linguistic correctness, from a lexical point of view.

In this talk, you will be exploring and walking down the bumpy road of trying to bring side-effect free code to F#. The journey started, in Ramon’s case, a few years ago while working for an IT consultancy company where Ramon made: Delegate.Sandbox, a library providing a Computation Expression named SandboxBuilder, sandbox { return 42 }, which ensures that values returned from the computation are I/O side-effects safe. The library is built-on top of .NETs Partially Trusted Code Sandboxes. The path of exploration somehow stalled.

Now with new ideas under the hood and great tooling provided by Microsoft and the amazing F# Community, the journey continues towards bringing this missed feature to an already brilliant and loved programming language, that is used by thousands in the magnitude of 4.

Hopefully one day, the reserved keyword: pure (The Holy Grail of F# keywords) will be claimed, and we will be able to use it with ease as we do with other keywords such as: seq, async, query, lazy and so on.

Link: F# eXchange 2017 full 2-days programme