PolyConf 2014 – Talks from Day 1
Morning began with fine cappuccino coffee and honey-spread bread. After initial difficulty to find the venue, me and my companion made it to the large school building where the conference was hosted. Here is an image of us failing to walk into the right building:
Talks began immediately.
I choose to present some of my notes from the talks here.
Audience participation in the talk hall was not so edifying. As always: “Don’t be that guy.”
#polyconf Best question time is NO question time.
— Olle Jonsson (@olleolleolle) October 30, 2014
The Value Of Diversity And Other Lessons From Biology
Garret Smith, an American Erlang man, (wearing a meme garment saying “utterly terrifying”) wanted us to compare the Paul Valéry evolution steps with making software. The steps are two:
- Gather Options (“combinations”)
- Pick the fittest Option
“The Valéry Method” of programming. Mr Smith described it a little like a decision-making tool, for cool heads. I like this.
Garret also went into some basic genetics. He was a character.
Flow-Based Programming For JavaScript
Henri Bergius is a skilled entertainer, presenting flow-based system NoFlo many times a week. While the delivery is low-key, his enthusiasm is strong.
The KickStarter that created an editor for FlowHub
Cross-Platform Functional Programming With F#
Michal Lusiak of Tretton37 talked about F# – described the eco-system, the deployment situation. “I mostly build apps for iOS and Windows Phone.” He went on to list some greatest hits of the platform.
- Pattern matching (“OCaml or Haskell people will say it’s stolen from them, and they are right.”)
- Units of Measure
- Type Providers, read up JSON into a statically-typed object you can intellisense on. “Dot-driven development”. Type Providers for SQL, for instance. “Strongly-typed SQL”. Traverse your Facebook friend tree.
Top Hits of F# by @mlusiak included the magic of Type Providers – give a JSON example, and the compiler will derive types from it. #polyconf
— Olle Jonsson (@olleolleolle) October 30, 2014
Honza Kral on ElasticSearch
The search infrastructure ElasticSearch has many clients. They’re well made, and Honza Kral told us what quality work goes into them.
In summary:
#polyconf @HonzaKral brims w/ enthusiasm for quality. "Implement idiomatic, bare-minimum, consistent clients!"
— Olle Jonsson (@olleolleolle) October 30, 2014
Bonus: Word used today include knowledge worker, multimedia, weblog.