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F# Summer of Code 2014

In the northern hemisphere summer is nearly open us, and to celebrate the F#unctional Londoners are putting on a series of 3 free hands on coding sessions.

The sessions are open to all levels of experience (and operating systems), and I believe will be a great opportunity to pick up new skills or extend existing ones. So bring your friends, your partners, your kids and your laptops for some coding fun.

 

F#unctional Londoners

 

Fractal Forest Dojo – Thursday June 26th


In this hands on session, we'll have some fun, dig into some recursion and fractals, and create beautiful tree drawings, along the lines of this one:

tall-tree

This session was the brainchild of Mathias Brandewinder, first showing in San Francisco at the beginning of the year. Since then it’s spread to groups in Minsk, Washington DC and now London.


Build a 2048 bot Thursday July 10th


2048 is a fun (and very addictive) game that can be played on the Web:

Canopy is an awesome F# UI web testing framework, built on top of Selenium:

Let's put them together, and build a simple bot that plays 2048, using Canopy!

This is another session from Mathias, check out his video above.


F#ore! A pleasant round of Code Golf – Thursday July 24th


In this hands-on session with Grant Crofton, we'll be having a game of Code Golf, where the objective is to complete your program in as few (key)strokes as possible.

Throw caution and good programming practice to the wind in your quest for an ever-decreasing character count!  Well-named variables?  Not today my friend.  Sensibly modularised code structure?  Hell no!  Comments?  You must be kidding..

Although the main aim is to have fun, it's also a great way to improve your F# language knowledge.  Do you *really* need those parentheses? Is pattern matching more concise than an If? Isn't there an operator that does this?! 

 

GameCraft

 

This summer sees the return of the GameCraft London at Skills Matter on Saturday June 7th! Last year’s event was huge, expect this year to be even bigger.

Although not specifically an F# event, expect to see a number of teams using F#.

Check out the great GameCraft resources page to get you started, and for F# game development I’d recommend also looking at:

With F# and Mono you can target iOS, Android, Mac, PC and Linux.

 

fsharpWorks |> Paris

 

fsharpWorks/Paris '14 on Friday June 27th is a one-day conference for developers who want to take the fast track to F#. The program will feature a morning of talks by world-class experts, demonstrating F# in action on a wide range of practical applications, and an afternoon of hands-on workshops, to learn first-hand how to use it productively.

Why go?

F# is an open-source, cross-platform, functional first programming language.

F# makes it easy to model complex problems simply. It offers great benefits in terms of reliability and safety. Its lightweight syntax make it a fantastic language for scripting, rapid prototyping, and interactive data exploration, with all the performance benefits of a statically typed language. And it integrates smoothly with existing .NET code bases. And... it makes coding fun again!

F# has seen an explosive growth in 2013, and is not slowing down. So if you want to take your development skills to the next level, come and join us for a fast track to F#!

Speakers include Tomas Petricek, Scott Wlaschin, Steffen Forkmann, Mathias Brandewinder, Robert Pickering and Jeremie Chassaing.

GameCraft NYC 2013

Thanks to Skills Matter last week saw the first GameCraft game jam event in North America.

GameCraft NYC 2013 Judging 

The first ever GameCraft was held in Dublin back in February 2012. Since then there have been GameCraft events all over Ireland, with an event in Derry sponsored by Nintendo the week before and a month before that an event at Skills Matter’s HQ in London.

This time I took a backseat from game development to help out during the day and take part in the judging of the finished games. The theme for the event was “lost doorways”, and teams had from 9:30am to 5pm to create their games. There were 4 teams on the day and the games they created were amazing.

The winner of people’s choice and best game was Purgatory, built with HTML 5 Canvas and Javascript (click on the picture below to launch the game):

Purgatory

What is also remarkable is that the team behind Purgatory met on the day!

Teledoor, another winning entry, this time created with Stencyl, is also playable online:

Teledoor

It’s a lot of fun meeting up with like minded people to build games and I’m looking forward to the next GameCraft in Telford!