November talks

Summary: I'll be talking at CodeMesh 2014 on 5th November and FP Days on 20th November.

I am giving two talks in London this month:

CodeMesh 2014 - Gluing Things Together with Haskell, 5th Nov

I'll be talking about how you can use Haskell as the glue language in a project, instead of something like Bash. In particular, I'll cover Shake, NSIS and Bake. The abstract reads:

A large software project is more than just the code that goes into a release, in particular you need lots of glue code to put everything together - including build systems, test harnesses, installer generators etc. While the choice of language for the project is often a carefully considered decision, more often than not the glue code consists of shell scripts and Makefiles. But just as functional programming provides a better way to write the project, it also provides a better way to write the glue code. This talk covers some of the technologies and approaches we use at Standard Chartered to glue together the quant library. In particular, we'll focus on the build system where we replaced 10,000 lines of Makefiles with 1,000 lines of Haskell which builds the project twice as fast. We'll also look at how to test programs using Haskell, how to replace ancillary shell scripts with Haskell, and how to use Haskell to generate installers.

FP Days 2014 - Building stuff with Shake, 20th Nov

I'll be giving a tutorial on building stuff with Shake. It's going to be less sales pitch, more how you structure a build system, and how you use Shake effectively. The abstract reads:

Build systems are a key part of any large software project, relied upon by both developers and release processes. It's important that the build system is understandable, reliable and fast. This talk introduces the Shake build system which is intended to help meet those goals. Users of Shake write a Haskell program which makes heavy use of the Shake library, while still allowing the full power of Haskell to be used. The Shake library provides powerful dependency features along with useful extras (profiling, debugging, command line handling). This tutorial aims to help you learn how to think about writing build systems, and how to make those thoughts concrete in Shake.