purecode: Functional Programming Talks
An informal meetup for the functional programming community in Sofia, aiming at promoting and extending the knowledge of Elixir, Erlang, Haskell, Kotlin, and Rust.
In the realm of IT, nothing happens for no reason. Everything is correlated, and the most recent trends are no exception.
These days as systems become more complex and as data becomes more plentiful we find ourselves searching for better ways to tame complexity and scale our workloads better.
The concepts of functional programming can help guide us on that journey and ensure that we, for example, safely parallelize our computations and that we make operations in our systems easier to reason about as we add, remove or modify them.
Functional programming has existed since the 1960s but as our industry grapples with the above problems it’s become clear that many of its lessons are more valuable than ever before. Join us to learn more about this rich paradigm from the experts at purecode!
On March 23, 2023, purecode will gather together tech professionals to share knowledge and expertise on functional programming. The event is organized by Quanterall and will be held live at the Sopharma Event Center, Sofia, Bulgaria.
This event is free but places are limited! Reserve a spot here.
Why do we do it?
The main goal is to share information about tools, techniques, and ideas that we’ve come across in the modern functional programming landscape.
Who is it for?
Everyone who is interested in learning more about what functional programming could offer them in their development journey.
What to expect?
Purecode will provide solutions for how functions can help us solve common problems. Additionally, it’ll demonstrate how to use Erlang to build a peer-to-peer blockchain node and why Elixir is ideal for data streaming, concurrent connections and updates, and parallel processing. You’ll find out how to use arrow-kt and other functional libraries to make your code enjoyable to work with and much more.
Moreover, the event will conclude with a networking session in the foyer, where you’ll be able to talk with peers about your codes and professional experience over beer and snacks.
You can see the full agenda here.
Lecturers with a wealth of knowledge!
Top software developers and other experts whose tech knowledge and skills are beyond comparison will talk about functional programming. The main topics will be transformation, security, code quality, scalability, app maintainability, cost-effectiveness, and more.
We are thrilled to share them with you:
Rickard Andersson — Software Developer, Quanterall
Rickard has been programming for 20+ years and has worked on video game backends, insurance, and financial platforms using languages such as Erlang, Elixir, and Haskell. He currently lives in Bulgaria and works in Quanterall where he works on prototyping, research, and tool-making in PureScript and other functional languages.
Guarantees and Intent in Software Development
Rickard’s talk will present a look into the differences between intent and guarantees in code, as well as how we can express them and leverage them to stay on track while building software.
Prof Simon Thompson — Professor of Logic and Computation, University of Kent
Simon works with IOG on languages for distributed application development, including Marlowe and Plutus, as well as audit and certification for DApps. He is also a researcher and educator in function programming at the Universities of Kent and ELTE Budapest and has published textbooks on Erlang, Haskell, and type theory.
Filip Haglund — CTO, Lesslie.se
Filip is after the orders of magnitude improvements in life. Previously a professional functional programming language designer recently turned CTO. Enjoys reasoning from fundamentals to turn things on their head.
What Should Error Handling Be Like?
Whenever the happy path meets the real world, those edge cases and exceptions inevitably come up. There are tons of ways to handle errors, and people like to roll their own. Filip will take a look at the fundamentals and reason our way toward choosing a better error-handling abstraction with the tools at hand, be it in C or Purescript.
Dimitar Ivanov — Core Developer, æternity crypto foundation
Dimitar is a software engineer from Bulgaria. He has been part of the AE core team for the past 5 years. Initially a crypto skeptic, Dimitar turned into a crypto enthusiast. All questions regarding technology are welcome but please no questions such as “Should I buy X?”
Implementing a Blockchain Peer Node in Erlang
Erlang is a programming language used to build massively scalable soft real-time systems with requirements of high availability. It runs on the BEAM virtual machine. A peer node has a lot of different components — ex. consensus, mining, networking, and peer discovery and communication. Dimitar and his team have also built their own smart contract virtual machine. Some other hard requirements are determinism and portability. In this talk, Dimitar will share his experience with all of those running on the BEAM.
Georgi Spasov — Software Developer, Quanterall
Georgi is experienced in designing and implementing backend architectures and has taken part in implementing multiple software solutions in Quanterall. The moment he was introduced to Elixir he found functional programming to be plain awesome. Since then he enjoys utilizing the functional way of writing code for any problem.
Elixir in a Nutshell
Learning a new programming language is always a challenge, especially if you deep dive into concepts like immutability, scalability, concurrency, and fault tolerance. Elixir manages to handle all of them and then some, yet somehow makes it seem easy. So Georgi will take a look into Elixir and everything you need to know about it.
Valentin Atanasov — Software Developer, Quanterall
Valentin’s professional journey began with PHP and OOP, but through the magical experience of attending conferences, he has been made aware of the existence of functional languages. From then on, his view on programming changed, and the more pleasant part of his professional life began.
The Promised Backend Land
This talk will be about Phoenix LiveView, which provides rich, real-time user experiences with server-rendered HTML. What does that mean, is it needed, and what makes LiveView different from the alternatives in other languages? These are some of the questions that this talk will provide an opinionated answer to.
Nikolay Tzvetinov — Senior Elixir Developer/DevOps, Eiger
Nikolay (or Meddle) is a developer with a lot of experience in different fields, programming languages, and tools.
He is interested in Elixir (because of its practicality and concurrency) and everything to do with functional programming, type theory, lambda calculus, and data-driven approaches.
Nikolay co-created the “Functional programming in Elixir” course at Sofia University and is part of its team and cause.
He is also a musician and a poet: smerch.bandcamp.com
Functional Programming as a Career (Elixir and Beyond)
15 years ago functional programming was just an academic toy for most of us, especially here in Bulgaria. Requirements and priorities change with time as we live in a very concurrent world now which leads to functional ideas like immutability, and reactive and data-driven systems that are highly available, as data becomes more mainstream.
Nikolay will talk about fields that are interested in more functional-like programming, data streaming, concurrent connections and updates, parallel computation, and the ease we can achieve with Elixir/Erlang. He’ll also share his own experience with the changing programming world and why he chose Elixir as his main tool for problem-solving.
Ivan Deskov — Staff Engineer, SumUp Careers
Becoming aware of the limitations of Java is what sparked Ivan’s interest in functional programming and writing code in a way that can be both satisfying and results-driven. Having built a solid base for his professional tech experience in the UK, he was eager to return to Bulgaria and continue implementing and developing his expertise. For the past few years, he has been a valuable part of the Global Bank Tribe at SumUp.
FP survival in the world of Java
How can we turn things around and bring functional programming concepts in frameworks written in Java for Java decades ago? Kotlin and arrow-kt come to the rescue! He’ll try to trace the evolution of Kotlin support in the Spring ecosystem and show us how we can leverage functional libraries like arrow-kt to make our code a joy to work with.
We believe in code as we believe in humans and we want to build better code that provides for a better humanity!
If you are interested in functional programming from a tech or business perspective, come! You can register for free at purecode.eventbrite.com or contact us for a partnership at media@quanterall.com.
