[Haskell] Announcing AusHac 2011 - The second annual Australian Haskell Hackathon (July 8-10)

[Alex Mason]

Attention all Australasian Haskellers!

After last year’s fantastic turnout for the first Australian Haskell Hackathon
- AusHac 2010 - we’ve decided to organise another. As it’s rather boring to
have a Hackathon with only two people, we encourage and welcome anyone
interested in Haskell in Australia, New Zealand and surrounding areas (or
further afield if you want!) to come and join us. Last year we had more than
25 Haskellers come from Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and even two
from as far away as New Zealand.

AusHac 2011 will be held from Friday July 8th until Sunday July 10th, again at
UNSW’s Computer Science building in Sydney. There’s no need to come for the
entire weekend, just for whenever you’re able to.

Last year, people worked on several projects including:

    • Accelerate: a high performance library for array computations using
      various backends (CUDA, LLVM, etc.) being written at UNSW.
      
    • Leksah: the Haskell IDE written in Haskell
    
    • DDC: the compiler for the Haskell-like language Disciple, which has
      strict evaluation by default, region, effect and closure typing and
      other interesting language features.
      
    • Hubris: the Haskell/Ruby bridge for calling Haskell from Ruby and
      vice-versa.
      
    • haskell-mpi: bindings to MPI, the message passing interface used
      frequently on high performance super-computers to allow programs to run
      on many nodes in parallel with easy communication.
      
    • There was even some work on LLVM to produce HTML output showing register
      allocations (as an aid to those writing new code generators etc.), which
      has now been included upstream. This work did not use Haskell, but it
      did happen at AusHac 2010.
      
    • And much more!


This is a great chance to collaborate with others and get feedback on your
work, while having heaps of fun and meeting other Haskellers, to verify they
do actually exist! And don’t worry if you can’t think of a project to work on;
just come along and pitch in with whatever strikes your fancy!


If you’re interested in coming and have a project you’d like to work on, check
out the wikipage http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/AusHac2011 where you can
add your project ideas, or just take a look and see what others will be
working on that you can help out with.


People of all skill levels are welcome, from complete beginners to Oleg-level
sage masters. We’re more than happy to help you learn Haskell if you’re just
starting out or help you solve that little niggly bit in your code.


If you’re interested in coming along, fill out our registration form
http://axman6.wufoo.com/forms/aushac-2011-sign-up/. Registration is required
so we know numbers and for you to get access to the university Wifi. Even if
you’re not sure, fill it in to express your interest, obligation free. We’d
rather know we have room for too many people than not enough.


So come along! And if for some reason you don’t enjoy yourself, registration
comes with a money-back guarantee!

Hope to see you there,

-- Alex Mason and Ivan Miljenovic, AusHac organisers


P.S: If you have received this email directly, it is because you have shown
     previous interest in AusHac by signing up via the previous signup. If you
     do not wish to receive any more email regarding AusHac, please email me
     (axman6 at gmail.com) and I'll be sure to take you off the list of
     interested people.