CamHac

Haskell Hackaton in Cambridge, UK, August 12-14, 2011

NEW: post-hackathon report

We'll build a list of everything that happened during the Hackathon on a separate page: CamHac/PostHackathonReport.

Hackathon Photos

About

Come and spend a weekend in Cambridge hacking Haskell code in great surroundings with fantastic company! Haskell Hackathons are a tradition where everyone is welcome; we get together, work on projects with others or just do your own thing, the overall goal being to improve the Haskell ecosystem.

CamHac will be held from 12-14 August 2011, at Homerton College in Cambridge. As with previous Hackathons, all are welcome -- you do not have to be a Haskell guru. All you need is a basic knowledge of Haskell, a willingness to learn, and a project you're excited to help with (or a project of your own to work on).

There will be lots of hacking, good food, and, of course, fun!

• Organiser: Simon Marlow (JaffaCake on IRC)
• Mailing list: hackathon@haskell.org
• IRC channel: #camhac on FreeNode

Many thanks to Microsoft Research Cambridge for agreeing to sponsor the event.

Registration

We are full, sorry! All 72 places are currently allocated.

We do have a waiting list, which we will use to allocate places if people drop out. If you would like to be added to it, please email msrcevnt@microsoft.com stating that you would like to be added to the waiting list for the "Haskell Hackathon", with the following information

 Full name:
 Which days you are attending on:
   day 1: yes/no
   day 2: yes/no
   day 3: yes/no
 Dietary requirements:

Venue

We're in the Leah Manning Room of Homerton Conference Centre. It is about 15 minutes walk from the train station, and Cambridge town centre is about 30 minutes walk.

Times:

• 0900: arrive any time from 9am, coffee and snacks will be available until 1000. Make sure you pick up your name badge and wifi details from the registration desk on arrival.
• 1045: break (coffee/tea, biscuits)
• 1230: lunch
• 1500: break (coffee/tea, cake)
• 1730: finish (we might be able to extend this a little if necessary)

There will be WiFi access, you will be given details when you arrive. We've been told that extra WiFi has been installed in the meeting room for us.

There will be a projector for giving talks/demos. We will probably reserve a part of the time for talks and demos.

Food

Tea and coffee will be supplied. We will have to go out to find lunch, but there are various places to eat and buy food at the Cambridge Leisure Park a few minutes walk towards Cambridge town centre. In the evening we will probably head towards the town where there are plenty of good restaurants.

We have been advised that only food provided by or purchased from Homerton College can be consumed on the premises.

Local arrangements

Getting to Cambridge

By Plane

• Stansted Airport: Stansted is the nearest of the London-area airports to Cambridge. It is mostly served by flights to and from mainland Europe, Ireland, and elsewhere in the UK. By train it is about 30 minutes to Cambridge, bus about 1 hour.

• Heathrow Airport: Heathrow is the principal London-area airport and one of the busiest in Europe with a wide range of national, European, and international services. By train it is about 1h30 to 2h to Cambridge (Heathrow Express is faster but more expensive).

• Gatwick Airport: Gatwick is the second "London" airport with a wide range of national, European and international services. By train it is about 2h to Cambridge.

• Other airports: Luton Airport, Norwich airport, and Southend airport are other regional airports in the East Anglia region. If you use these, car or taxi is the best option for travel to Cambridge.

Trains from London

London has two train lines into Cambridge, London Kings Cross and London Liverpool Street. There is a regular service on both lines and duration is under an hour on the direct trains. Go to National Rail to check train times.

You can usually buy tickets at the station both at a ticket machine or a staffed counter. You usually will not be able to buy tickets on the train without paying a fine. Tickets can be cheaper if you buy off-peak and return trip. Off-peak tickets are usually valid on weekends and after 10 a.m. on weekdays. Make sure, though, to check National Rail for which trains are eligible for off-peak tickets.

Getting to the venue

Walk from the train station (about 15 minutes)

How to find the venue

Local Taxis: Panther Taxis 01223 715715

Accommodation

VisitCambridge: Where to Stay in Cambridge

The nearest hotels to the venue seem to be:

• Travelodge (Cambridge Central) is just a few minutes walk from the venue. It is currently charging £65.80 per night for 11-14 August.
• Helen Hotel
• Bridge Guest House
• Fairways Guest House
• Abbeyfield Guest House
• Rock View Guest House
• Alington House Guest House
• Cambridge Youth Hostel. The hostel does not offer single rooms, but you might be able to organise a group to occupy one 4-bed room.
• Stay in Cambridge Colleges

If you contact any of the above and find they're booked up, please remove them from the list.

Microsoft Research recommends the following hotels to visitors, these are closer to the city centre but are probably a lot more expensive than those above:

• Double Tree by Hilton Garden House Cambridge
• Crowne Plaza Cambridge
• De Vere University Arms

Projects

Use this space to list projects you are interested in working on, and add your name to projects you are interested in helping with.

• General hacking away at Snap Framework (exact goals TBD), perhaps adding/improving documentation/tutorials at the same time. (Jurriën Stutterheim, Twey)
• Darcs
• Something games/3d related? (Stephen L) [edit: can't think of anything gamesy, so probably will do some graph data-mining stuff]
• LambdaCube 3D engine (Csaba Hruska)
  • Discussion about graphics pipeline DSL
• Designing/proposing/implementing a new low-level network package, similar in role to 'network' itself (Ben Millwood, Twey)
  • See also User:benmachine/New network package
• A service to help find or contribute examples of usage of a package, under hackage, github.
  • Or a clone of Carcassonne (a board game). - Neillb
• Writing a library that implements the ideas of Typing Haskell In Haskell to type-check, say, a haskell-src-exts AST (Ben Millwood, Stijn van Drongelen)
  • I've been advised that THIH is actually quite old, and I might want to find a different base to work from. Any input appreciated. --Ben
    • Use a constraint-based approach, like the monadic constraint library that was presented at Anglohaskell the other year. Much more pleasant. --Philippa
    • Since haskell-src-exts includes GHC-specific extensions, why not round-trip via the GHC AST? That could also be used by other tools. --Nominolo
    • Part of the idea was to be more lightweight/modular than GHC, but it would still be a good way to test :) --benmachine 00:22, 12 August 2011 (UTC)
• wxHaskell (Maciek Makowski)
• System.Process: Provide a way to send arbitrary posix signals to a ProcessHandle. Matthiasg 20:56, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
• Have an option to avoid using package.cache, because it makes working with Open Embedded quite hard. Matthiasg 15:57, 27 June 2011 (UTC)
• Hackage 2 (Ben Millwood)
• Data.Text (Jasper Van der Jeugt)
• unordered-containers (Johan Tibell)
• I probably deserve a real kicking for this, but: a TeX replacement. Specifically, embed TeX in Haskell so you can both parse down to its semantic layer and manipulate the semantic layer stuff (which is still pretty-printable back out to TeX as a bunch of primitives and not-so-primitives). Got a bunch of ideas for this, but it's mostly an itch I just got - am currently reading through the TeXbook to check I've understood how TeX itself works sufficiently though, and who doesn't want a backwards-compatible-including-extensions TeX replacement with better syntax, typechecking and the potential for better debugging? --PhilippaCowderoy 22:04, 3 August 2011 (UTC)
  • Not going to be there, so unless anyone's feeling particularly brave I'm guessing this one's a goner.
• Cabal, cabal-install, Haskell Platform, nixpkgs (Andres Loeh)
• A NumPy / PDL style scientific library (Jacek Generowicz)
• Generating bindings using GObjectIntrospection (Will Thompson)

Talks/demos

If you have a talk or demo you want to give, add your name to the list below. Let's restrict these to short slots (say 20 mins max). Tentatively we'll have a session of talks and demos on Saturday afternoon, but we can always move things around if necessary.

Attendees

1. Simon Marlow
2. Jurriën Stutterheim
3. Neil Mitchell
4. Jasper Van der Jeugt
5. Max Bolingbroke
6. Ben Millwood ‘benmachine’
7. Roman Leshchinskiy
8. Gregory Collins
9. Martijn van Steenbergen
10. Sjoerd Visscher
11. Sebastiaan Visser
12. Tom Lokhorst
13. Erik Hesselink
14. Jeff Foster
15. Sebastian Korten
16. Alessandro Vermeulen
17. Vlad Hanciuta
18. Ganesh Sittampalam
19. Eric Kow
20. Alexander Njemz
21. Mikolaj Konarski
22. Ian Lynagh
23. Andres Löh
24. Jeroen Janssen
25. Nicolas Wu
26. Duncan Coutts
27. Dominic Orchard
28. Jacek Generowicz
29. Owen Stephens
30. Stephen Lavelle
31. Sam Martin
32. Alex Horsman
33. Andy Georges
34. Niklas Larsson
35. Raeez Lorgat
36. Maryna Strelchuk
37. Vincent Hanquez
38. Chris Done
39. Tomas Petricek
40. Thomas Schilling
41. Dragos Ionita
42. Simon Meier
43. Will Thompson
44. Sergii Strelchuk
45. Lennart Kolmodin
46. Steven Keuchel
47. Michal Terepeta
48. Maciek Makowski
49. Johannes Weiß
50. Alejandro Serrano
51. Mike McClurg
52. Stefan Wehr
53. David Leuschner
54. James ‘Twey’ Kay
55. Simon PJ
56. Neill Bogie
57. Csaba Hruska
58. Bart Coppens
59. Stijn van Drongelen
60. Jeremy Yallop
61. Paul Wilson
62. Dmitry Astapov
63. Matthias Görgens
64. Johan Tibell
65. Ian Knopke
66. A O Van Emmenis

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