Hac φ 2010 roundup

Hac φ 2010 has come and gone, and just like last year, everyone seemed to have a fantastic time. There’s just something wonderfully stimulating about being in the same room with a bunch of other smart, motivated Haskell hackers, even if they’re working on other projects.

• Doug Beardsley (mightybyte) worked on the newly released Snap web framework, and gave a great talk introducing some of its features.
• Edward Kmett worked on his new library for reverse-mode automatic differentiation.
• Daniel Wagner worked on a gtk-based puzzle game, which is actually fun and somewhat addicting. When he shared a working version halfway through the hackathon everyone’s productivity dropped a notch. =)
• Scott Walck, Sam Griffin (sfultong), Dan Mead (dmead) and I worked on the core of the redesigned diagrams library.

If you worked on something or know of something that was worked on that I missed, please leave a comment! There were also great talks by Edward on finger trees, by Anthony Cowley on his Haskell code for robot exploration and path planning, and by Gershom Bazerman on techniques for recovering strong indexed types for untyped data (e.g. when parsing).

Big thanks go to Galois and to my advisor Stephanie Weirich for helping sponsor the event. At this point the plan is certainly to have another one next year!