Monthly Archives: November 2011

November 17, 2011 – Lab “F# in three hours”

Leave a reply

Special Theme Night: “F# in three hours”

Join us this Thursday as we “up our game” as a development community.

We are going to get started with Microsoft’s excellent functional programming language F#. No prior F# experience is expected. Dan Mohl (a Microsoft F# MVP) will be on hand to keep us moving.

We will start by getting everyone set up with the tools. We will walk through some language basics as a group. From there, we will each pick from a list of seven problems and (using the buddy system) we will solve them. In the third hour Dan Mohl will demo some new features of F# 3.0 (currently in Developer Preview) such as Type Providers.

We will wrap up the lab with a discussion on how we can build a functional programming community in Nashville. Do we want a new F# subgroup? How about a general functional meetup group (F#, Erlang, Haskell, Clojure, …)?  Be there and help us decide.

About F#:
F# is a succinct, expressive and efficient functional (and object-oriented) programming language for .NET. It comes bundled in Visual Studio as a first-class language alongside C#, VB.NET and C++. F# has been described as a feeder language for C# which means new features will be introduced in F# first and will trickle into C# in later releases. F# helps you write simple code to solve complex problems.

Links:
- F# on MSDN
- Search Twitter for F# news (#fsharp)
- Don Syme’s F# 3.0 presentation from BUILD 2011

Hope to see you there!

November 10, 2011 – Elections, Burke Holland on “HTML 5″, and the winter job fair

Leave a reply

Elections (~ 6:20 pm)
We will hold officer elections for 2012. Nominations are open until the voting starts. Here are the current nominations:

  • President: David Neal is currently unopposed
  • Vice-President: Josh Bush is currently unopposed
  • Secretary: Csaba Toth, Delmont Jones
  • Treasurer: Frank Grimmer is currently unopposed
  • Member-at-large: Gaines Kergosien is currently unopposed

The Lecture (~ 6:30 pm)
Topic: HTML5 Techniques You Can Use Today
What is HTML5? What is a polyfill? How do I use a canvas? In this session we’ll take an in-depth look at what HTML5 is, and where it’s going. You should leave this session with concrete techniques and concepts that you can use immediately to jumpstart or accelerate your HTML5 development.

Links to get smart:
- HTML5 Rocks (http://html5rocks.com) has a bevy of videos, tutorials, posts and sample code for getting started with HTML5, and…
- HTML5 Doctor (http://html5doctor.com) is a dictionary of HTML5 terms, definitions and specifications for helping you do HTML5 development today.

Speaker: Burke Holland
Burke Holland is a web developer living in Nashville, TN. He enjoys working with and meeting developers who are building mobile apps with jQuery / HTML5 and loves to hack on social API’s. Burke works for Telerik as a Developer Evangelist focusing on Kendo UI. Burke is @burkeholland on Twitter.

The Winter Job Fair (~ 7:30 pm)
After the lecture we will open the floor for a discussion on jobs. We are assembling a panel to keep the conversation rolling. We will also have entrepreneurs, bloggers and open source contributors on the panel to discuss things you can do to control your own value on the market. We are also inviting three recruiting firms (TEKSystems, TrueBridge, and Alltech) to send a representative to discuss what their clients are looking for. Should be fun and illuminating.