Are you looking for ZuriHac 2020?

What is ZuriHac?

ZuriHac is the biggest Haskell Hackathon in the world: a completely free, three-day grassroots coding festival organized by Zürich Friends of Haskell. It features fantastic keynotes, interesting tracks, and of course lots of hacking and socializing!

When and where?

ZuriHac 2019 takes place Friday 14 June to Sunday 16 June and is hosted at the HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil. This modern venue is located right at lake Zürich and provides space for 500 participants.

Who can attend?

Everyone! We will have a dedicated beginners' course, and there will be mentors and Haskell gurus on site whom you can directly approach during the whole event with any Haskell-related question you have.

Add to your calendar: iCal or Google Calendar.

Program

How it works

ZuriHac focuses on three goals:

• to work on interesting open source projects;
• to learn more about our favorite programming language; and
• to have fun and build a community!

ZuriHac is not a conference. Most of the time is reserved to work on projects together. At the start of the Hackathon maintainers get a few moments to present their project. If you want, you can join any of these projects and learn, contribute code, write documentation, or make any other sort of progress. There will be something for all skill levels.

Of course — in between hacking — we love learning from some of the most interesting Haskellers out there, so we have a couple of keynotes from several amazing people from both industry and academia. In addition to that, there are some free courses you can take as well.

You can identify volunteer mentors from the dark blue Zurihac shirt. They welcome any questions you may have about Haskell, so please grab them if you have any issues or questions.

Tracks

Beginner Track

The beginners track features a free course focused on Haskell language fundamentals with no prior experience to the language assumed or required.

Topics that will be covered include:

1. Binding values and scope
2. Functions & their first class nature
3. Closures, partial application, and composition
4. "Built In" & "Create Your Own" types
5. Type classes
6. Working with lists and text
7. Reading & writing data to files

Important update: unfortunately, Julie, will not be able to make it to ZuriHac this year. Ryan Moore will be teaching the beginners course in her absence.

Advanced Track

The Haskell experts from Well-Typed will teach a two-part course in the advanced track. The two sessions are completely independent and take place on Friday and Saturday afternoon.

• Friday: Adam Gundry will host a session about Advanced Types, so you can learn about various GHC type system extensions.

• Saturday: Duncan Coutts will lead a session on Evaluation & Performance. He will teach you how to properly reason about evaluation in Haskell program, and discuss performance pitfalls.

GHC Track

This year we will again feature a dedicated GHC track to foster contributions to GHC and teach newcomers how to participate in GHC's development. It was a great success last year, and this year we are even more excited about the incredible programme we have for you.

The following workshops will take place:

Richard Eisenberg
Friday 14:15 - 15:15
A high-level overview on the GHC compilation pipeline.

Matthew Pickering
Friday 15:30 - 16:00
Tools for working on GHC.

Simon Hafner
Friday 16:15 - 16:45
NoTopLevelFieldSelectors and GHC's renamer.

Andrey Mokhov
Saturday 13:30 - 14:00
Hadrian build system.

Simon Peyton Jones
Saturday 14:15 - 15:15
Understanding GHC's type inference engine.

Docs Track

Writing good docs is a non-trivial task, and can hugely improve how your users see your software. Beth Aitman, technical writer at our sponsor Digital Asset, will teach you how write effective and clear documentation. With the right conceptual understanding you might even start loving to write docs for your projects!

This track consists of a talk at 11.00 on Saturday, followed by collaborative doc writing for any projects that are interested.

Projects

Like each year, ZuriHac hosts many projects by and for attendees. You can see the full list here.

We would like to highlight a few projects from our generous sponsors!

• Digital Asset will be hacking on Haskell IDE Core a lightweight, extensible base for LSP IDE tooling based on Shake and GHC Lib. More info.

• Are you interested in smart contracts? Serokell and TQ are developing tools to work with Tezos. They will host a Morley Hackathon!

Food

Lunch

Lunch coupons are sold at the registration desk. A single lunch coupon costs CHF 12, or CHF 35 for three days. Vegetarian options are available during every lunch. Of course, you are always free to go to nearby restaurants and/or supermarkets, like the past years.

The exact menu will be announced here before the event.

Ramen

We are working with SudelNuppe to provide an on-site Ramen (Japanese Noodle Soup) dinner option for Friday. Coupons for this can be bought directly from the vendor on Friday evening.

Miso Ramen (vegan), CHF 14
Vegetable Stock, Miso Tare, Beetroot, Chard, Kombu, Shitake, Bio-Tofu (CH)

Shoyu Ramen, CHF 15
Chickenstock, Shoyu Tare, Chachu (Porkbelly, CH), savoy cabbage, turnip, Kombu, Shitake, Bio-Egg (CH)

Summer Salad Bowl, CHF 14
Tomato-Bulgur, Fennel, Orange, Humus, Green Bean, Bio-Tofu (CH), Sesame Dressing

Barbeque

On Saturday evening, there is a bring-your-own meat BBQ. Meat (or vegetarian/vegan alternatives) can be obtained from nearby supermarkets. Migros is nearby and has a decent selection, but it does not sell alcoholic beverages.

This map has a number of options under Groceries.

Coffee & refreshments

On Friday, a selection of beverages will be available from the small cafetaria.

From Saturday on, we will have three coffee machines to serve free coffee during the event. These are located in the common hacking area in building 1 (first floor). RedBull will provide a fridge with 600 cans free of charge.

Registration

The Hackathon is completely free but the number of participants is limited to 450 people. To this end, it is very important to us that you timely cancel your registration in case you cannot attend. Around two months before the Hackathon, we will ask you to confirm your registration and after that you will be able to access your ticket.

Once we reach maximum capacity you will be queued into a wait list. In case that somebody cancels we will fill up the seats from the wait list in first come first serve order and let you know. Please do not book anything before we have confirmed a seat for you in a confirmation email.

Scholarships

Update: we have received (and accepted) a good number of scholarship candidates. We are not accepting new applications at this point due to budget constraints.

Switzerland can be expensive for people visiting from abroad. ZuriHac is a free event, but transportation, lodging, and food might discourage somebody without a good income from attending. We want to make it easier for anyone to come, and contribute towards making the Haskell community exciting and diverse.

For that reason, we will provide a small number of scholarships this year. Because we do not charge anything for tickets, our budget is limited and you can consider this year a "trial run" of the program. Anybody accepted will be supported with an amount between 100.- and 500.- Swiss Francs, depending on your expenses.

Our focus is on people with limited financial means and underrepresented groups in tech -- the latter includes, but is not limited to: people of colour, anyone identifying as LGBTQIA+, women, and disabled people.

You can apply by sending an email to [email protected], and include:

• A breakdown of your cost estimates (flight, train tickets, hotel/hostel/airbnb, food...).
• Why are you interested in functional programming? Don't write an essay: one or two sentences should be enough.
• What makes you eligible? Again, keep this brief, and please only share what you are comfortable with.

We will not disclose the recipients of these scholarships, in order to protect their privacy. The amount you estimate for your expenses will not be a factor when we consider your application. If necessary, we can transfer the money to you before you buy your plane/train ticket, so that you don't have to pay upfront if you are cash-strapped.

Don't be shy and just contact us if you feel that this can make a difference to you. There is no downside to applying, and we will never disclose your identity.

Contact

If you have any questions before the event, please reach out to Jasper Van der Jeugt, Juri Chome or Farhad Mehta. We also monitor our official Twitter account.

The primary medium to communicate with other participants is our Slack Organization. We use the hashtag #zurihac on Twiter, and you can discuss the Hackathon on IRC in #zurihac channel on Freenode.

Terms and Conditions

Each participant will retain ownership of any and all intellectual and industrial property rights to his or her work created or used during the Hackathon.