LambdaConf 2019
2019-06-12
Last week, I got the opportunity to be a volunteer for LambdaConf 2019. It all started when I heard about LambdaConf from someone at the local Haskell meetup that I go to. They had nothing but good things to say about the event, so I decided to do some more research. A ticket to LambdaConf was out of my price range so I applied for both the scholarship and volunteer programs. I got a call from Courtney DeGoes, one of the organizers of LambdaConf, a few weeks later telling me that I’ve been accepted to be a volunteer for LambdaConf 2019. I was assigned the position of room concierge. My duties were to record talks, ensure audio equipment was working properly, and signal speakers when their time was up. Pretty straightforward. To be honest, I’ve never recorded a talk before so I was a bit nervous that I might mess up the recording of a great talk and it’d be lost forever… Thankfully, that never happened, but I was in a situation where one of the speaker’s slides wouldn’t show properly on the projector screen. A fellow volunteer came to the rescue by turning the projector off and on; the first thing I should’ve done but didn’t think to do so in the heat of the moment. Now it is forever seared in my mind, as it should’ve been in the first place, that the best way to fix any malfunctioning technology is by turning it off and on. Besides this trip up, my experience as a volunteer for LambdaConf went better than I expected. I got to witness some super interesting talks and got to interact with some very knowledgeable people in the functional programming community. Not only was the conference amazing, but the activities that I got to participate in after the conference were too. I went on the longest hike I’ve ever experienced up the Sanitas Trail in Boulder, CO.
Beautiful scenery. At the very top of the trail I enjoyed a delicious artichoke and cheese sandwich while peering out into the vast horizon. The land and sky seemed like an ocean. From where I was sitting, I could see storm clouds forming over another mountain across from the one I was on. It was really cool. Shout out to Courtney and John DeGoes for organizing the hike! The day after the hike, I went to the PureScript hackathon hosted by LambdaConf. Here I met Jordan Martinez, the creator of this amazing PureScript resource[1], who helped me get the PureScript compiler and REPL setup on my computer. I’d been trying to use PureScript for the past few weeks, but I could never get the compiler or REPL to work until that day. I was so happy when everything finally worked :) After I got past that hump I was able to play around with PureScript for the first time and I had fun. I tinkered with the react-basic library[2], a PureScript library that provides bindings to React, and made a simple counter with increment and decrement buttons. My React knowledge is a tad rusty, but I was able to piece things together using Pursuit[3] and the help of other hackers at the event. I plan on studying PureScript and react-basic more, and in the future would like to do a blog post on how to use these technologies. In conclusion, LambdaConf 2019 was an amazing experience and I really hope they do it again next year. I learned that conferences are a great way to meet interesting people, and they can open a lot of doors to advance your career. Thanks to all the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and attendees for making LambdaConf 2019 happen!
Footnotes:
[1] https://github.com/JordanMartinez/purescript-jordans-reference
Jordan’s ultimate PureScript reference
[2] https://github.com/lumihq/purescript-react-basic
The react-basic library
[3] https://pursuit.purescript.org/
Hoogle, but for PureScript