Hedy: A gradual programming language for education

Everyone should learn programming, right? Yes! But how…? Felienne has recently developed a new programming language aimed at education, which she will introduce in this talk.

Before presenting Hedy, Felienne will outlines the history of programming education and didactic beliefs in programming, as well as presenting an overview of how people learn in general, and how programming education could take lesson from cognitive science into account.

Felienne Hermans

Felienne is associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University, where she heads the PERL research group, focused on programming education.

Felienne was also one of the founders of the Joy of Coding conference, with a similar goal, which she organized for 6 years. Since 2016, she has been a host at SE radio, one of the most popular software engineering podcasts on the web. When she is not coding, blogging or teaching, she is probably knitting, running or playing a (board)game.

Cloud Superpowers with Pulumi and F#

Feeling daunted creating cloud resources by clicking around in web portals or automating your deployments with scripts, YAML files, or JSON templates?

In this talk, Mikhail will introduce Pulumi, an open-source tool that leverages programming languages to manage infrastructure, yet in a declarative manner! Using developer tools that you know and love, you can now apply unit testing, reusable architecture, deployment policies, and continuous delivery while provisioning resources in the cloud. Obtain the cloud superpowers while using F#!

Mikhail Shilkov

Mikhail Shilkov is a software developer at Pulumi, enabling developers and operators to work better together. Mikhail is a Microsoft Azure MVP, a Russian expat living in the Netherlands. He is passionate about the serverless mindset, leveraging the full variety of managed cloud services, and handling cloud infrastructure as code.

Probabilistic Programming: The What, Why and How

f(x) = y, but y = 5. What’s the probability that x =1? Probabilistic programming is the idea of describing probabilistic models as programs, to then automatically infer how our beliefs about model parameters change given observed data. In recent years, probabilistic programming languages (such as Stan) have demonstrated the power of this approach by becoming the underlying tool behind numerous projects in social science, biology, genetics, astrophysics, and engineering.

But why haven’t such languages been more widely adopted yet? In this talk, Maria will talk about the nuts and bolts of probabilistic programming languages, addressing the challenges behind making these languages general-purpose, automatic, and efficient. In addition, she will discuss how ideas from programming-language research can be adopted in probabilistic systems, and how F# has helped her in the endeavour of bridging the gap between statistical modelling and probabilistic inference.

Maria Gorinova

Maria is a PhD Student at the University of Edinburgh with broad interests range from programming languages and verification, to machine learning and human-computer interaction. More specifically, she's interested in probabilistic programming languages, and in exploring ways of applying program-analysis techniques to existing PPLs in order to improve usability of the language or efficiency of inference. During her PhD, she has been working on these topics in relation to the probabilistic programming languages Stan and Edward2.

Formatting F# source code

Having a good formatter for your source code seems like a well-established concept for many languages in these modern times. Prettier for JavaScript, for example, is a joy to work with. The formatting story for F# is a different one. There is a project called Fantomas, which was started in 2013 and sadly it lost its main contributor. Until it was rejuvenated in 2018 by a dynamic duo in the F# mentorship program. In this talk, I'd like to share my journey from my first pull request to become a maintainer of Fantomas. Discussing the technical aspects as well as the road to ownership.

Florian Verdonck

.NET consultant @ Axxes

Florian is a passionate young .NET consultant at Axxes. With a love for functional programming, he contributes to open-source projects and tries to be active in the community.Axxes is a full-service IT consultancy agency. High technological knowledge of driven consultants, when you need it, where you need it. IT is about people!

F# and Ham Radio

How I used F# and .NET Core to develop a customizable APRS messaging system, for digital radio communications, that runs on a Raspberry Pi and inexpensive radio equipment. I will cover APRS and Ham radio, and how I used F# to implement the APRS specification. I will focus on the functional domain modeling aspects, which include designing by types and using active patterns to parse messages. My project is called Chickadee, is open source, and you can find it on GitHub. Features include a web UI built on Saturn, a map using Azure Maps, a background service, a CLI built with Argu, a test suite built on Expecto, and a build script using FAKE.

Marnee Dearman

I have been a programmer for about 15 years mostly working on the .NET stack and SQL Server. I like teaching and helping people learn about programming and technology. For the past year I have been a volunteer with the Microsoft TEALS programming, teaching programming twice a week at City High, in Tucson.

I am also a Ham and have served for many years on the Board of Directors of the Oro Valley Amateur Radio Club. I have worked mostly with APRS, and developed my own APRS client called Chickadee. I am also interested in mesh networks, software defined radio, digital modes, peer-to-peer networking, and low power radio.

From Zero to F# Hero

Starting from zero F# knowledge (but having a fairly functional style) over the last 12 months I've found myself writing less and less C# and TypeScript and ever more F# culminating in my Performance For Cyclists By Cyclists project - a full stack, end to end, F# project for analysing cycling performance data hosted on Azure.

In this session I want to talk about my motivations for getting started with F#, my learning journey, and how F# helped me build my cycling system and experience the most productive development environment of my career. As well as the bits that hurt.

James Randal

Recovering OO developer, now embracing the functional. Hoping to never see a class, dependency injector or mutable state ever again.

I've spent over 25 years implementing systems in various languages, runtimes and environments. These days I get most of my kicks by proxy as a CTO but remain active as a developer in the OSS space and there's always a side hustle.

Q&A with Phillip Carter from the F# team

Phillip Carter from the F# team will be joining us for a closing session of the fsharpConf conference! We will discuss what is the F# team at Microsoft in Redmond working on, what are their plans for the near future and we will answer questions from the audience. Ask us anything about F# at Microsoft on Twitter at @fsharponline or using the #fsharpconf hashtag, or in the channel on the F# Foundation Slack!

Phillip Carter

Phillip is a PM on the .NET team working on F# tooling, the F# language, F# documentation, Azure Functions tooling, and whatever else his little heart desires. He wishes he had more time to code, but that doesn't stop him from geeking out on all sorts of technical details with people on GitHub. Oh, and he's helping drive the future of .NET and its languages.

F# Domain Modeling and Mathematical Planning

Do you or your clients ever have the question, "What would be the best course of action for us to take considering the options we have available and the restrictions we are under?" This is the question that businesses and clients are asking every day, sometimes multiple times a day. The good news is that there is an entire branch of Mathematics, Mathematical Planning, which focuses on this question and it is easier for developers to harness these tools than ever before.

Mathematical Planning is a powerful tool for decision making but has largely been relegated to use by experts. Recently it has been breaking out of its isolation due to great libraries becoming available for Python (PuLP and the Gurobi Python Library). Now the challenge is making sure your model is correctly formulated since Math cannot tell you if what you wrote makes sense.

Fortunately, F#s powerful type system makes creating a Domain Model for your problem simple and straightforward. We will show that the F# type system and Mathematical Planning are a beautiful marriage and make asking the question, "What is the best plan?" a joy.

Matthew Crews

Matthew Crews is a Machine Learning Engineer who focuses on the intersection of Mathematical Optimization and Predictive Models. He loves to teach and build tools to make it easier for developers to harness the power of Mathematical Optimization.

When Korean Hackers Met F#

In this talk, we present an anecdotal story about two Korean hackers who have recently started adventurous projects in Korea, the country where F# is widely unknown. Specifically, we introduce challenges that we faced while hiring Korean students and hackers that do not know anything about F#, and discuss our recent achievements in both academia and industry. We then discuss our recent effort in teaching F# as part of undergraduate education with auto-grading activities.

Finally, we conclude our talk by advertising our local F# meetup group (F# |> Korea).

Sang Kil Cha & JongHyup Lee

Sang Kil Cha is an associate professor of Computer Science at KAIST.

He completed his PhD in the Electrical & Computer Engineering department of Carnegie Mellon University. His current research interests revolve mainly around software security, software engineering, and program analysis. He received an ACM distinguished paper award in 2014. He is currently supervising GoN and KaisHack, which are, respectively, undergraduate and graduate hacking team at KAIST.

JongHyup Lee is an associate professor of Mathematical Finance at Gachon University. He is also a cofounder of PiLab, a blockchain software company. He received his PhD from the Computer Science Department at Yonsei University and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University. His interests include smart contract focused blockchain technologies and software security.

SAFE Stack – The Road Ahead

SAFE Stack has continued to grow and evolve since it’s launch nearly two years ago and has helped improve understanding and acceptance of F# as a great choice for web development.

In this lightning talk, Isaac will summarise the successes of SAFE and F# on web in general, before discussing the team’s plans for SAFE v2 and beyond, including templating, documentation and how-to guides.

Isaac Abraham

Isaac Abraham is an. NET MVP and a .NET developer since .NET 1.0 with an interest in cloud computing and distributed data problems.

He is the author of Get Programming with F# and is the director of Compositional IT. He specializes in consultancy, training and development, helping customers adopt high-quality, functional-first solutions on the .NET platform.

What is going on in F# Software Foundation

Reed will be talking about the upcoming F# Foundation board elections, activities that the foundation is supporting and answer questions from the audience.

Ask him anything about F# Foundation on Twitter at @fsharpConf or using the #fsharpconf hashtag, or in the fsharpConf channel on the F# Foundation Slack!

Reed Copsey, Jr.

Reed Copsey is the executive director of the F# Software Foundation, a non-profit organization setup by the F# community to promote, protect and advance the F# programming language

How to build an F# Type Provider from scratch

We are filled in a world of ever expanding Data. And for the most part Type Providers give you a way to easily talk to those data sources in a convenient type checked way. For the most part there are Type Providers for virtually all the popular data sources out there. However, maybe there is a novel datasource that you come across? Or maybe you want to look under the hood and understand how this piece of "compiler magic" actually works? Well this talk is for you.

In this quick talk Ody will show how to build a simple CSV type provider from scratch

Ody Mbegbu

Ody Mbegbu is a software engineer at Edelweiss Connect, building data tools for Scientific Datasets all written in F#.

A Career Pivot Straight Into F# Development

Demetrix is a biotech start-up whose software infrastructure is built in F#. We have a small, (mostly) experienced software development team, but we also try to encourage our users to interact with the codebase as much as possible, regardless of coding experience. I used to be one of these contributing users while working in our Analytical Chemistry group, before making the move to Software full time four months ago. In this talk I'll touch on what we do as a company, how our software team supports that, and the experience of learning F# for relatively novice programmers such as myself.

Finn van Krieken

Finn is an analytical chemist turned software developer at Demetrix. This move was largely driven by his interest in data infrastructure, and in particular the way that good data infrastructure can enable easier, faster, and more fruitful analysis of complex data and, ultimately, offer sound justification for scientific decisions.

On Independence!

Don will discuss different notions of independence in technologies and why they matter for .NET and F#

Don Syme

Wikipedia says: Don Syme is an Australian computer scientist and a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, U.K. He is the designer and architect of the F# programming language, described by a reporter as being regarded as "the most original new face in computer languages since Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++ in the early 1980s.

But do we REALLY need to introduce Don to F# community?

Future of .NET

In this short talk, Immo is giving an overview of what is coming in .NET 5 and what is happening with .NET Standard

Immo Landwerth

Immo Landwerth is a program manager on the .NET Framework team at Microsoft. He works on the base class libraries (BCL) which represents the core types of the .NET platform, such as string and int but also includes collections and IO.

He's involved with portable class libraries and works on shipping more framework components in an out-of-band fashion via NuGet.

Build Fabulous desktop and mobile apps in 2 easy steps

Desktop and mobile apps written in a purely functional style is now a reality.

Fabulous takes the successful Elm architecture to existing UI frameworks, most notably Xamarin.Forms.

In this lightning talk, Timothé will demonstrate how easy it is to build apps with Fabulous and discuss how it might evolve in the future.

Timothé Larivière

Timothé Larivière is a .NET developer and maintainer of Fabulous. He worked for 7 years as a .NET consultant and loves building desktop and mobile apps. A few years ago, he got hooked up on functional programming. Combining his 2 loves quickly led him to get interested in Elmish.XamarinForms which later became Fabulous.