The Google Open Source Programs Office recently co-sponsored a three-day hackathon for Haskell, an open source functional programming language. Johan Tibell from Google’s Zurich office talks more about the event below.
On the weekend of May 29th, 120 Haskell enthusiasts got together for the 5th installment of ZuriHac, a yearly open source Haskell hackathon held in Zurich, Switzerland. This year we were back where it all started in 2010: the ground floor of the Google Zurich office.
The schedule was packed solid, and we also put together a complete three day experience for the many beginners in attendance. One room was dedicated to beginner talks and staffed by volunteer mentors (thanks all of you!) that made sure everyone had someone to turn to for questions or just some casual chatting about Haskell. Videos from three of those talks are now online: Monads by Example, Beginning Web Programming in Haskell, and Performance.
The main event featured a mind-bending talk about interesting implementations of sorting algorithms by Edward Kmett (slides) and a deep-dive into writing high-performance binary serialization code by Duncan Coutts (slides).
We ran out of whiteboards so we had to use flipcharts!
After the intense hacking sessions, we had organized barbeques down by the Zurich lake. We had a very good turnout, taking over a large part of the park.
Sharing a public barbeque with the locals.
All in all it was a very intense and enjoyable weekend, and we’ll try to organize the event again next year. Perhaps we can beat the current 120 attendee record!
By Johan Tibell, YouTube team
(edited 23 July 2015 with a correct link for the Beginning Web Programming in Haskell video. Thanks to our sharp-eyed reader who commented!)