Friendly Functional Programming

Last month we took a look at Haskell, this time we will investigate Elm (https://elm-lang.org/) together. Elm is a small, easy to learn language that was in many ways inspired by Haskell but specifically created to make it easy to create web frontends in. One of it's key selling points versus JavaScript is that it aims for a "No runtime exceptions" experience and it values safety and ergonomics in various ways, not least by providing exceptionally nice compiler error messages.

Our speakers this week are Max and Daniel.

Max (@mxinden) is a Systems engineer working on the open source monitoring project Prometheus and its integration with the Kubernetes ecosystem to monitor cloud-native Linux container infrastructures. Designing and implementing distributed systems on top of the Linux operating system and Kubernetes orchestrator. Presenting open source work at various IT conferences and champion the Prometheus project as a core maintainer.

Daniel (@danyx23) is a software engineer currently working for Douglas Connect, a small Swiss company working on software solutions in the field of toxicology. He's lucky enough to be able to use Elm and F# at his job and enjoys exploring other languages in his spare time.

The evening will follow our usual setup:

• Doors open at 18:30

• At 19:00 we start with a half hour introduction of the language by Daniel

• Then Max will talk about Alertmanager's [1] web UI they built in Elm and what it was/is like using the language.

• Finally we will socialize or participate in an open hacking session of about an hour to try Elm out for yourself, either alone or in small groups. We will have a small example project that you can use to get started but you can always work on something else as well of course.

We want this to be an inclusive learning environment for everyone and thus follow the Berlin Code of Conduct (https://berlincodeofconduct.org/). If you are from a group that is under-represented in tech, please feel especially welcome!

Come join, it should be fun!

[1] https://github.com/prometheus/alertmanager