Today was the last day of our Haskell Hackathon and “Learn Haskell Workshop”. I think it would be fair to call it a resounding success!

photo by Bryan O’Sullivan

On Friday we had about 27 hackers: Off to a great start. We hacked until dinner @ La Fiesta (nice walk to and from the Dojo.) In the evening, the other room at the Dojo was host to an Ignite conference. The theme was “better” and I gave a 5-min / 20-slide ignite talk: “Haskell is Better“. Many people from the audience came up to me later and said they were really intrigued and would stop by the next day.

On Saturday we had a four hour “Learn Haskell Workshop” with about 40 new and beginning Haskell programmers. I taught basics and got as far as leading the group to write their own implementation of map, using an alpha version of Barley.

We also had a few advanced sessions (which I didn’t get to see) including Johan Tibell on performance tuning, and Evan LaForge on his music system. The workshop concluded with a presentation on Haskell in Industry from Don Stewart.

After the workshop, everyone, new, experienced and in-between settled into hacking and conversation well into the night. All told, there were 70+ people at the Hackathon that day.

The final day, Sunday saw a few hours of more intensive, directed hacking. At the end of the day, Conal Elliott gave an impromptu seminar on “Denotative Programming” that had a dozen people rapt for over an hour. When I finally left to have dinner with my kids, there were still dozen or so Haskell hackers in the Dojo.

If you were there, thanks for coming out and making this event a great time.! Please leave a comment and let us know what you hacked on, learned, or talked about at the Hackathon.