Racketfest

Racketfest is a time to learn & share what’s great about the Racket programming language and its philosophy of language-oriented programming. The next edition will be held on Thursday, February 27, 2020.

Offer a 5–10 minute talk. About what? You decide! Tell us about a cool package you use that opened new avenues or improved your productivity; show us a side project you’re working on; or ask for help on some issue that’s bugging you. If it’s about Racket, it’s in!

We'll build a web app on the fly to show where all of the pieces that we mentioned in the morning talk fit together.

Learn how I use Racket and language-oriented programming to procedurally generate dinosaurs, and potentially other animals, through my own DSL. This language, called Anatomy, lets me concisely define bones and how they can change in relation to one another, letting me define a generic dinosaur skeleton that’s capable of morphing into any dinosaur! Learn even more about different ways you can use language oriented programming for procedural generation, but most of all, expect to learn more about taxonomy than you wanted to!

Racket comes with a solid set of batteries included for web development, but that set is not quite enough for building complex web applications. In this talk I'm going to walk through the pain points I encountered while building an e-commerce website in Racket and some of the tooling I've built along the way. I'm going to talk about continuations, geolocation, form validation, database migrations, DSLs for SQL, session management, error reporting and more!

To apply for a diversity ticket, please write to the organizer (Jesse Alama) at jess@lisp.sh .

Space is limited! If you’d like to come, consider getting a ticket earlier rather than later.

If you for register for Racketfest, you’re entitled to a discounted ticket to BOB!

Racketfest pairs well with BOB , taking place in Berlin the day after Racketfest ( Friday, February 28, 2020 ) at Lohmann & Birkner (Alt-Reinickendorf 25, 13407 Berlin) BOB asks: What happens when we use what’s best for a change? . Come find out! (You’ll find that they’re pretty sympathetic to Racket over there.)

Professionalism Policy

Racketfest borrows from the spirit of Racket, whose community aims to improve the world through programming. Racket started with the goal of introducing everyone to the wonderful world of program design, with a spirit of full inclusion and no emphasis on any specific group. Over time it has grown into a full-fledged professional community with a well-known reputation for helpfulness and openness on its on-line communication channels. We want that openness and friendliness to extend to Racketfest.

For this to happen, Racketfest needs to be a space that where everyone can participate without fear of personal harassment. Harassment is understood here as unwelcome or hostile behavior, which, in turn, we understand as behavior that focuses on people instead of ideas. The ACM’s anti-harassment policy lists some unacceptable behaviors. Responses such as just joking , only teasing , or being playful , are unacceptable.

In short, be professional and kind. We’re all here to learn and share.

Anyone witnessing or subject to unacceptable behavior should notify the Racketfest organizer (Jesse Alama).

If a Racketfest participant engages in harassing behavior, the Racketfest organizer may take any action they deem appropriate, ranging from a verbal warning to expulsion (without refund) from the conference.

(The wording of this policy is derived, with permission & thanks, from that of RacketCon, which in turn was derived from the SNAPL conference.)