Houston Functional Programmers

Adam Gordon Bell, "Functional Programming is Undefined"
2020-10-21 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | Zoom (connection info provided in comments)
Functional Python Programming and Verified Functional Programming in Agda are both books teaching functional programming. Yet the books are about very different things. How can this be? Over the course of 58 interviews, Adam Gordon Bell has interviewed many experts on software development. These include programming language creators, high-performance computing experts, and functional programming gurus. In this session, Adam will share some behind-the-scenes information about the podcast and a collection of insights he has learned from his guests. One of these insights is that functional programming, as a term, is undefined.

Adam is a software engineer and an open-source advocate. He is currently working on the open-source build tool earthly (http://earthly.dev/) . He is the host of the popular software development podcast Corecursive (http://corecursive.com/).

Office Hours
2020-09-16 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | TX
This month, we’ll be having office hours in lieu of a speaker. This is a chance to show off works-in-progress, ask questions or generally help others out with any kinds of questions in functional programming languages. Feel free to BYOBeverage and chat if you like.

"That's so META" with John Cavnar-Johnson
2020-08-19 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | TX
Please join us this Wednesday night at 7 pm CDT when John Cavnar-Johnson will discuss “That’s so META”, a talk about “metaprogramming” – what is metaprogramming? Join us and find out!

What happens when an ordinary programmer discovers that the META (Most Effective Tactic Available) for the problem at hand is metaprogramming? Metaprogramming (where code treats other code as data) has long been a tool mostly reserved for the “big brain” computer scientists. In this session, I use some existing metaprogramming tools to cobble together a solution to a real world problem (bridging the gap between a relational data model and F# discriminated unions and record types). If an old liberal arts major can pull this off, you can too.
John Cavnar-Johnson is a software developer/architect working as a Principal Consultant for Improving. In the last 30 years, he’s been a corporate developer, IT sysadmin, trainer, software development manager, IT enterprise architect, consultant, and entrepreneur, but mostly he’s spent his time solving problems and hooking stuff together. In his spare time, he likes reading, drinking craft beer, and playing with his grandkids.

Jean Yang of Akita Software
2020-06-17 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | TX
I am excited to welcome Jean Yang as our guest for our meetup this Wednesday, June 17 at 7 pm CDT. She will be discussing:

We need API tools as much as we need developer tools
Fuzzing as a formal method for correctness

She is also going to cover some of the work she and her team at Akita Software have been working on.
Please join us! This should be very interesting. We will once again be using Zoom to handle our meetup. The URL is:
https://zoom.us/j/92789988549?pwd=[REDACTED]

Introduction to Pony with Sean T. Allen
2020-05-20 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | TX
I am excited to announce that Sean T. Allen will be joining us to provide an informal introduction to the Pony programming language.

Functional Geekery's Steven Proctor
2020-04-15 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | TX
I am excited to announce that our virtual guest this month will be Steven Proctor, the host of the Functional Geekery podcast. He will be joining us on Google Hangout to talk about his podcast – how he produces it, how he selects guests and other topics!
I hope you can join us this month on our Hangout on Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 7 pm CDT. I made the invite public so you should be able to RSVP on it as well as get the Hangout URL from there.

Introduction to Erlang with Mark Allen
2020-02-19 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | Improving, 10111 Richmond Ave, Suite 100, Houston, TX, 77042, United States
Join us Wednesday February 19, 2020 at 7:00 pm for an introduction to the Erlang programming language and its run-time system. We haven’t had an “Intro to…” talk for a while, so Mark Allen will be leading a session to help you dip your toes into the warm and sometimes slightly weird water of functional programming. No prior experience with functional programming or Erlang is needed. Beginners are welcome.

"Pure Operation-Based Replicated Data Types" with Gyan Aggarwal
2020-01-15 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Chicago) | Improving, 10111 Richmond Ave, Suite 100, Houston, TX, 77042, United States
This month Gyan Aggarwal will present a talk on the paper “Pure Operation-Based Replicated Data Types” by Carlos Baquero, Paulo Sergio Almeida and Ali Shokar. What is a CRDT? It’s a special kind of data type which can be synchronized to the same state across multiple replicas as long as all replicas get all of the messages.
Paper abstract: Distributed systems designed to serve clients across the world often make use of geo-replication to attain low latency and high availability. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) allow the design of predictable multi-master replication and support eventual consistency of replicas that are allowed to transiently diverge. CRDTs come in two flavors: state-based, where a state is changed locally, shipped and merged into other replicas; operation-based, where operations are issued locally and reliably causal broadcast to all other replicas. However, standard definition of op-based CRDT is very encompassing, allowing even sending the full-state, and thus imposing storage and dissemination overheads as well as blurring the distinction from state-based CRDTs. Pure Operation-Based CRTDs send only operations to other replicas, drawing a clear distinction from state-based CRDTs.
Our talk this month will be on Wednesday, January 15, 2020 at 7:00 pm. Our meeting will be held at Improving, 10111 Richmond Ave, Suite 100, Houston, TX 77042. There is plenty of free parking in front of the building. Click here to get directions.

Holiday Social
2019-12-18 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Ron’s Pub, 1826 Fountain View Dr, Houston, TX, 77057, United States
Join us as we gather for a few holiday drinks at Ron’s Pub near Fountain View and San Felipe just north of the Galleria on December 18, 2019 from 7 until 8:30 or 9. There’s no speaker and no agenda: you can come and go as you like. Hope to see you there!
We will be back to our usual meetings in January! Have a wonderful holiday season, y’all.

Probabilistic Record Linkage of Hospital Patients with Chris Oakman
2019-11-19 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Cannon, 1334 Brittmoore Road, Houston, 77043, United States
How can you tell if a patient is the same person across all the different electronic systems used in a hospital?
Can you be confident with messy data when lives are on the line?
Medical startup Luminare faced this challenge in a hospital setting and used Clojure to save the day and make the nurses happy again.
This talk will explore the challenge of record linking: dealing with dirty data sets, the pros and cons of different solution approaches, and using the Felligi-Sunter method to create a probabilistic algorithm to match records.
Three Main Ideas of the Talk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage
1) What is Record Linkage? ie: how to recognize the problem
2) What is the space of possible solutions? Different kinds of data require different solution approaches. How to recognize which methods will work best with your dataset.
3) Creating a probabilistic algorithm using the Felligi-Sunter method. I will walk the audience through the creation of a real-world probabilistic algorithm using Clojure.
Speaker Bio
Chris Oakman is a software developer, designer, and educator from Houston, TX.
He works at Luminare – a medical startup based out of the Texas Medical Center – and teaches software development at DigitalCrafts – a coding bootcamp school.
He is the author of several open source projects, including the cljs.info cheatsheet, the CLJS logo, and several Parinfer ports and editor plugins.
Location, time and RSVP
We will be meeting at The Cannon, which is nearby the intersection of Beltway 8 and I-10. While our normal meeting time is the third Wednesday, this month we will be meeting on Tuesday November 19, 2019.
