2026 event planning

[frasertweedale]

We will use this issue to plan and schedule events for 2026.

Talks

Schedule

• 2026-01-?? - 2026 kickoff event (planning TODO)
• 2026-02-10 - Regular meetup - Web double header
  • @gwils - Servers as Functions (abstract)
  • @endgame - Standalone API packages with modern Servant (abstract)
• 2026-03-10 - Regular meetup
  • @donovancrichton - Algebraic Structures as Interfaces
  • @carlohamalainen - 34 years of Monad tutorials - has anyone learned anything? An anthropological study
• 2026-03-28 (Saturday) - Q1 Hack Day
• 2026-04-14 - Regular meetup
  • post-Hack Day lightning talks / show-and-tell
    • Isaac: local hoogles
    • the other Isaac: Gameboy emulator
    • Fraser: The Hackage vulns
    • AND MORE...
  • @endgame - Doing AWS things with Haskell
• 2026-05-12 - Regular meetup
  • @timbalam (Timothy Lamberton) What is the derivative of a data type? (Zippers)
  • @carlohamalainen - Datastar - the hypermedia framework
• 2026-06-09 - Regular meetup
  • ?
• May/June? - Q2 Hack Day
• 2026-07-14 - Regular meetup
  • ?
• August-September? - Q3 Hack Day
• 2026-08-11 - Regular meetup
  • ?
• 2026-09-08 - Regular meetup
  • ?
• 2026-09-19 (Saturday) - proposed date of Sydney FP conf
  • noting here for conflict avoidance and reminder to promote it
  • Calvin Fong organising
• 2026-10-13 - Regular meetup
  • ?
• October/November? - Q4 Hack Day
• 2026-11-10 - Regular meetup
  • ?
• 2026-12-xx - End of year Social event?
  • TODO

Concrete but unscheduled

These are concrete talk proposals where we have a willing presenter. Please file separate issues for general topic requests.

• Naso Evangelou-Oost - Subtypes and quotient types in Lean 4
• @flatwhatson - Hygienic Macrology in Scheme
• @flatwhatson - Type Reconstruction in Pre-Scheme

Requested topics

• Debugging in Haskell (stack traces, etc)

Venues

• BCC Library Brisbane Square (main talks)
• UQ St Lucia (hack days)

[endgame]

I think Feb is realistic for me to do a talk about modern Servant and the idioms we use at work.

[gwils]

February:
My talk should be less brain-melting than Jack's, so I propose to go first.

Servers as Functions
In FP, we love building things out of functions, so why not a web server? This talk will compare two web server libraries in different languages: http4s in Scala and http4k in Kotlin. Both are inspired by the same paper, Your Server as a Function (Marius Eriksen, 2013).
We'll look the key ideas from the paper and see how well each library embodies them. Along the way we'll meet the Kleisli type and see how Scala and Kotlin approach FP differently.

[endgame]

February:
Agreed.

Standalone API packages with modern Servant

Servant promises that if you write out your web APIs as types, everything will stay in sync. So why is it that, six months in, your OpenAPI spec is lying about your JSON structure, and why has that other team gone off and hand-rolled their own client for your API?

API types often share a package with the server implementing them, but that's a large dependency footprint for clients and code generators to swallow. The answer is a standalone API package, which gives you a place to property-test your schemas and to define a structure for your severs and clients to copy. I'll be walking you through Bellroy's opinionated defaults for such packages and show how we take advantage of modern servant features like union verbs and nested record routes, so that you'll be able to immediately apply these patterns to your own projects.

[frasertweedale]

@timbalam still good for Map? Could you please furnish me with an abstract and title at your earliest convenience? Also, what's your handle on Discord?

[timbalam]

Hey Fraser, currently still good for May. My discord handle is lambdroid.

Talk title: What is the derivative of a data type?

Abstract: The same rules of differential calculus that you learned in high school can be applied to take derivatives of data types. These data type derivatives are very useful for exploring and efficiently modifying the original data. Welcome to the world of zippers, one-hole contexts and the surprising application of math for everyday programming.

A zipper is like a file explorer for your data structure, allowing you to enter nested structures, access and modify values efficiently, and find your way back out again. In this presetation we will discover a principled way to build zippers by data type differentiation.

The intended audience for this presentation is working programmers, students, and anyone interested in what sits at the intersection of mathematics and computers.