Lambda Luminaries in 2014

[Andreas Pauley]

Hi Luminaries,

Our 2014 meetups has started with an excellent talk by Handré on the
Typeclassopedia.
You can have a look at the slides here:
http://hanstolpo.github.io/HaskellTalk_Intro_Typeclassopedia

The slides are actually an executable program in literate Haskell, very cool :-)

We would like to keep you entertained with lots of FP goodness during
the rest of 2014, and we need your help.
The easiest way you can help our group right now is to invite some
friends or colleagues to join.
Like we mention in our group description, you don't have to be an
expert to join us, you just need to be interested in Functional
Programming.

You can send this link to people you think may be interested:
http://www.meetup.com/lambda-luminaries

We also have a twitter handle if you'd like to follow us:
https://twitter.com/lambdaluminary

The second thing you can do is to make a presentation of any of the
cool stuff you've been looking at anyway, and tell us about it at one
of the meetups.
Anything that touches on FP will be cool. Email me or Handré if you
think you may have something interesting.
We already have a talk for February (thanks Dolan), but we would
really appreciate some talks for March and onwards.

Some ideas:
- Functional programming and Javascript. Maybe Elm, Fay, ClojureScript etc.
- Mobile development and FP.
- Functional programming on embedded devices.
- Game development in functional languages, or in a functional style.
- An overview of anything that is written in an FP language or style,
eg. Datomic, RabbitMQ, Riak, Akka, Yesod, Pedestal, Play etc.
- How you have used FP in a pet project, or a project at work. Did
you experience some FP goodness or challenges when you started to shun
side-effects? Tell us about it.
- Any functional concept that you found mind-bending at first, and
that you can now help the rest of us to understand.
- Any functional language you've been looking at.
- Any Computer Science topic that would interest people like us.
Cryptography? Compilers? DSL's? Concurrency? Some math concepts that
may be useful to understand?

Do you have anything in particular that you would like to hear about
in this group? Please let us know.
Would you like to help with the recording and publishing of our talks online?

In 2013 we had some interaction with other groups as well.
I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture to students of Dr. Solms
at the University of Pretoria.
Alen gave a talk at Software Freedom Day.
And we've been in in contact with the people from the Jozi JUG,
DeveloperUG and Scala Jozi.

This year we want to get involved with more groups in order to "help
foster and grow a healthy FP community" as we say in our list of
goals.
If you have an introductory talk that may get developers interested in
FP, we can ask the organisers of some of the other groups if they will
be interested in hearing them.

I'm giving my intro to FP talk to the DeveloperUG in March, and I'm
keen to present it to other interested developers:
http://www.meetup.com/DeveloperUG/events/139983502/

The people at House4Hack are doing some really interesting stuff:
http://www.house4hack.co.za/ (have a look at their Quadcopters)

We've been invited to help out at Random Hacks of Kindness at the end
of last year, although we did not exactly rock up in numbers.
This year we can hopefully bring some more talent to the table.

In the past I have attended a Code Retreat, and there were lots of
interest in FP there.
It took the form of a series of pair programming sessions (coding
Conway's Game of Life), and when I mentioned functional programming
and Erlang lots of people wanted to see it in action.
http://www.meetup.com/coderetreat/

The Tech4Africa conference is asking for speaker submissions. Last
year they had talks on Clojure and Scala, but they definitely need
more talks on Functional Programming.
http://speak.tech4africa.com/

I know Mikkel is involved with the Joburg Centre for Software
Engineering, and I'm sure we have members involved in other areas as
well.
Let us know if there are other groups that may be interested in some
aspect of functional programming.

And finally, we are looking for some more meetup sponsors.
If you want 5 minutes before a talk to tell the smartest group of
programmers in South Africa (and me) about your company, then you can
do this for the bargain price of sponsoring pizza and beer.

Until the next meetup,
Andreas


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