This Friday saw the first ever F# eXchange, a one-day 2 track conference dedicated to all things F#, hosted at Skills Matter in London and attracting developers from across Europe.

There was a strong focus on open source projects throughout the day including MBrace (data scripting for the cloud), Fake (a DSL for build tasks), Paket (a dependency manager for .Net), the F# Power Tools and FunScript (an F# to JS compiler). In fact all the presenters used the open source project FsReveal to generate their slides!

Keynote

Tomas Petricek opened proceedings with a keynote on The Big F# and Open Source Love Story:

One of Tomas’s observations, on slow development for open source projects resonated with many, where successful projects often start as just a simple script that fulfils a specific need and slowly gather momentum over time.

As an example, in Steffen Forkmann’s presentation he talked about how Fake had started as a simple F# script and over the years seen more and more contributors and downloads, with the addition of high quality documentation having a huge impact:

FAKE in numbers: 4278 commits, 137 contributors, 157252 downloads! Amazing work by @sforkmann & contributors at #fsharpx — Tomas Petricek (@tomaspetricek) April 17, 2015

Talks

All the talks were recorded, and all the videos are already online!

The videos:

Steffen also took advantage of his talk to make a special announcement about Paket:

Panel

The day ended with some pizza, drinks and a panel organized by prolific F# contributor, Don Syme:

Each panel member pitched why they thought F# was good in their core domain area from cloud, games, design, data science, scripting through to web.

There were some interesting discussions, and some mentions of the recent fsharpWorks led F# Survey.

2016

The date for next year’s F# eXchange 2016, the 16th April, is already in the calendar, hope to see you there, and please take advantage of the early bird ticket offer, only 85GBP up until the 16th June!