Melbourne Compose Thursday 21 May: Michael Webb & Jack Kelly - Two Haskell Talks from Bellroy
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John Walker
May 2, 2026, 4:17:40 AMMay 2
to Melbourne Compose Group
Two Haskell Talks from Bellroy
We're thrilled to have two Bellroy Haskellers presenting a double-feature at Melbourne Compose Group.
Michael Webb (CTO) will share how Bellroy built and scaled a $120M+ brand with a tiny Haskell team.
Jack Kelly (Staff Engineer) will walk through deploying Haskell in the cloud with an opinionated guide to Haskell on AWS Lambda.
Whether you're using Haskell in production, curious about serverless, or just want to see how a small team moves fast without fear, come along!
Details Below
The Talks
Michael Webb - CTO
Maximum Agency, Minimum Footguns
Lessons from scaling a $120M+ carry brand with a tiny engineering team
At Bellroy, we've built a small engineering team that moves fast, ships confidently, and hands real power to the people closest to the work - content editors, ops staff, marketers - without lying awake worrying about what they might break.
The secret isn't process, approval chains, or change management theatre. It's that we've encoded the constraints that actually matter directly into our tools - many of them built in Haskell - and trusted our people with everything else.
This talk is about the philosophy behind that approach: what it means to design for agency rather than safety, what cultural practices make such an approach practical and why a type system is the most underrated management tool in a company's arsenal.
Jack Kelly - Staff Engineer
Lambda on Lambda: Running Serverless Haskell Functions on AWS
[AWS Lambda]([https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/)) is AWS's
"function-as-a-service" offering, where your code runs in an isolated
"microVM" on AWS-managed infrastructure and you pay only for the
resources used while your code runs.
Fitting your binaries into this model means making your code talk to
some internal AWS APIs, and luckily the Haskell ecosystem has some
good tools for doing this.
In this talk, I'll explain at a high level what AWS Lambda is, how it
executes your code, and then provide an opinionated guide and demo for
getting your Haskell functions into the cloud.
When and Where
Format: Strictly IRL
When: Thursday 21 May 2026, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Where: Kathleen Syme Centre, Activity Room 2, Carlton (Melbourne Victoria, Australia)
RSVP: https://luma.com/uhdgct1v
About Melbourne Compose Group
Melbourne Compose Group is the monthly in-person meetup for functional programmers in Melbourne, every 3rd Thursday of the month in Carlton.
As always, newcomers welcome. Reach Ben on 0407 990094 if you have trouble accessing the venue.
Hope to see you there :)
-Ben Hutchison & John Walker
We're thrilled to have two Bellroy Haskellers presenting a double-feature at Melbourne Compose Group.
Michael Webb (CTO) will share how Bellroy built and scaled a $120M+ brand with a tiny Haskell team.
Jack Kelly (Staff Engineer) will walk through deploying Haskell in the cloud with an opinionated guide to Haskell on AWS Lambda.
Whether you're using Haskell in production, curious about serverless, or just want to see how a small team moves fast without fear, come along!
Details Below
The Talks
Michael Webb - CTO
Maximum Agency, Minimum Footguns
Lessons from scaling a $120M+ carry brand with a tiny engineering team
At Bellroy, we've built a small engineering team that moves fast, ships confidently, and hands real power to the people closest to the work - content editors, ops staff, marketers - without lying awake worrying about what they might break.
The secret isn't process, approval chains, or change management theatre. It's that we've encoded the constraints that actually matter directly into our tools - many of them built in Haskell - and trusted our people with everything else.
This talk is about the philosophy behind that approach: what it means to design for agency rather than safety, what cultural practices make such an approach practical and why a type system is the most underrated management tool in a company's arsenal.
Jack Kelly - Staff Engineer
Lambda on Lambda: Running Serverless Haskell Functions on AWS
[AWS Lambda]([https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/)) is AWS's
"function-as-a-service" offering, where your code runs in an isolated
"microVM" on AWS-managed infrastructure and you pay only for the
resources used while your code runs.
Fitting your binaries into this model means making your code talk to
some internal AWS APIs, and luckily the Haskell ecosystem has some
good tools for doing this.
In this talk, I'll explain at a high level what AWS Lambda is, how it
executes your code, and then provide an opinionated guide and demo for
getting your Haskell functions into the cloud.
When and Where
Format: Strictly IRL
When: Thursday 21 May 2026, 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Where: Kathleen Syme Centre, Activity Room 2, Carlton (Melbourne Victoria, Australia)
RSVP: https://luma.com/uhdgct1v
About Melbourne Compose Group
Melbourne Compose Group is the monthly in-person meetup for functional programmers in Melbourne, every 3rd Thursday of the month in Carlton.
As always, newcomers welcome. Reach Ben on 0407 990094 if you have trouble accessing the venue.
Hope to see you there :)
-Ben Hutchison & John Walker
Jack Kelly
May 24, 2026, 6:10:22 PMMay 24
to Melbourne Compose Group
May 2, 2026 at 6:17 PM, "John Walker" <thegh...@gmail.com mailto:thegh...@gmail.com?to=%22John%20Walker%22%20%3Ctheghostjw%40gmail.com%3E > wrote:
> **Lambda on Lambda: Running Serverless Haskell Functions on AWS **
>
> [AWS Lambda]([https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/%5D(https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) ) is AWS's
I promised to upload my end-to-end worked example of how to provision and deploy Lambda Functions using OpenTofu, and I've done that over the weekend. You can find it here: https://git.sr.ht/~jack/lambda-on-lambda
I hope it's useful to people, or at least an interesting read.
Best,
-- Jack
> **Lambda on Lambda: Running Serverless Haskell Functions on AWS **
>
> [AWS Lambda]([https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/%5D(https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/) ) is AWS's
> "function-as-a-service" offering, where your code runs in an isolated
> "microVM" on AWS-managed infrastructure and you pay only for the
> resources used while your code runs.
>
> Fitting your binaries into this model means making your code talk to
> some internal AWS APIs, and luckily the Haskell ecosystem has some
> good tools for doing this.
>
> In this talk, I'll explain at a high level what AWS Lambda is, how it
> executes your code, and then provide an opinionated guide and demo for
> getting your Haskell functions into the cloud.
Thanks for having us, it was a great night.
> "microVM" on AWS-managed infrastructure and you pay only for the
> resources used while your code runs.
>
> Fitting your binaries into this model means making your code talk to
> some internal AWS APIs, and luckily the Haskell ecosystem has some
> good tools for doing this.
>
> In this talk, I'll explain at a high level what AWS Lambda is, how it
> executes your code, and then provide an opinionated guide and demo for
> getting your Haskell functions into the cloud.
I promised to upload my end-to-end worked example of how to provision and deploy Lambda Functions using OpenTofu, and I've done that over the weekend. You can find it here: https://git.sr.ht/~jack/lambda-on-lambda
I hope it's useful to people, or at least an interesting read.
Best,
-- Jack
John Walker
May 25, 2026, 5:26:37 AMMay 25
to Jack Kelly, Michael Webb, Melbourne Compose Group
Thanks to you both Jack and Michael!
I realy enjoyed both talks.
Hope to see you next time you're in Melbourne on Compose night.
John
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