I attended LambdaConf 2016 in Boulder, Colorado, from 26 to 28 May 2016. This was my first time in Boulder and the views of the mountains were quite impressive. Maybe if I go next year I’ll take the time to climb up some of those mountains:
So, on to the conference: I had a great time and had the opportunity to meet many interesting people. Now, it’s important to remember that this was a functional programming conference, so the geekiness was turned all the way up to 11. It was all semigroups, monads and setoids. And it was bliss.
Highlights for me included:
- Sharon Steed’s keynote: Sharon steed impressed me. She is a motivational speaker who has fought and overcome a serious stutter. I think we could all learn a great deal from her experience.
- Meeting Sepideh of Maptime Boulder: Maptime Boulder is a group of hardcore map enthusiasts and they are big fans of Tableau’s mapping capabilities. Had I known about this beforehand, I would’ve made a special detour to talk to the group’s members at one of their regular meetings. I am by no means a Tableau map expert, but it’s great to know that there are people out there who are so passionate about it!
- Seeing the best monad tutorial so far (courtesy of Marcus Griep: I think achieve transcendence or, at least, experienced the best five-minute monad tutorial so far in my life. And I’ve seen a lot of them. If anybody wants me to present his material to them, please let me know! Here’s a direct link to the presentation.
- Meeting Chris Allen and Julie Moronuki: I’m a big fan of their book “Haskell Programming from First Principles”. Good people! Great novelty Haskell T-shirts!
This is a necessarily brief rundown of the highlights.