ZuriHac is the biggest Haskell community event in the world: a completely free, three-day grassroots coding festival co-organized by the Zürich Friends of Haskell and the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Science. It is not your standard conference with papers and presentations, but features fantastic keynotes, hands-on tracks, hacking on many of your favourite projects, and of course lots of socializing!
ZuriHac 2026 takes place Saturday 6 June — Monday 8 June as a physical event at the beautiful Rapperswil-Jona campus of OST located right next to lake Zürich. We hope to see you there!
Speakers
Simon is one of the designers of the Haskell language, an inspiring leader for the whole Haskell community, a prolific researcher, and one of the main authors of GHC, the de facto standard Haskell compiler. He currently works on Verse.
Garrick is the developer of Defect Process, a 2D action game written in Haskell. He currently works as a backend software contractor.
Michael Sperber is CEO of Active Group. Mike specializes in functional architecture. He has authored many papers and books on the subject, and is an expert on teaching programming.
Jencel is a writer turned programmer. They are the author of the book Category Theory Illustrated.
Evan is mostly known as the creator of the Elm programming language. He currently works around the intersection of databases and typed functional programming.
Schedule
ZuriHac is primarily a community event and a hackathon, rather than a conference. Aside from the talks and tracks, attendees are encouraged to work together on all sorts of Haskell-related open-source projects and socialize. Trying to attend everything may a bit too much, so our recommendation is just pick to what you find interesting!
This schedule is tentative and minor changes may still need to happen as we get closer to the event.
| Start | End | Title | Link | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-06-06T09:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-06T10:00:00+02:00 | Registration Opens | admin | |
| 2026-06-06T10:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-06T11:00:00+02:00 | Talk | talk | |
| 2026-06-06T11:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-06T12:00:00+02:00 | Opening Presentation & Project Pitches | admin | |
| 2026-06-06T12:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-06T14:00:00+02:00 | Food Truck | food | |
| 2026-06-06T14:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-06T16:00:00+02:00 | Beginner Track | beginner | |
| 2026-06-06T14:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-06T16:00:00+02:00 | Advanced track | advanced | |
| 2026-06-06T17:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-06T18:00:00+02:00 | Talk | talk | |
| 2026-06-06T17:30:00+02:00 | 2026-06-06T20:30:00+02:00 | Food Truck | food | |
| 2026-06-07T10:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-07T11:00:00+02:00 | Talk | talk | |
| 2026-06-07T11:30:00+02:00 | 2026-06-07T14:00:00+02:00 | Food Truck | food | |
| 2026-06-07T13:30:00+02:00 | 2026-06-07T16:00:00+02:00 | Beginner Track | beginner | |
| 2026-06-07T13:30:00+02:00 | 2026-06-07T16:00:00+02:00 | Advanced Track | advanced | |
| 2026-06-07T17:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-07T18:00:00+02:00 | Talk | talk | |
| 2026-06-07T17:30:00+02:00 | 2026-06-07T20:30:00+02:00 | Food Truck | food | |
| 2026-06-08T10:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-08T11:00:00+02:00 | Talk | talk | |
| 2026-06-08T11:30:00+02:00 | 2026-06-08T14:00:00+02:00 | Food Truck | food | |
| 2026-06-08T13:00:00+02:00 | 2026-06-08T15:00:00+02:00 | Advanced Track | advanced | |
| 2026-06-08T15:30:00+02:00 | 2026-06-08T16:15:00+02:00 | Project presentations | admin | |
| 2026-06-08T16:15:00+02:00 | 2026-06-08T17:00:00+02:00 | Closing | admin |
ZuriHac Prelude
The Haskell Ecosystem Workshop and the Haskell Implementors’ Workshop will take place on the two days just prior to ZuriHac 2026, June 4 & 5 2026. Organised by the Haskell Foundation and the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences in Rapperswil, these events are co-located with the ZuriHac.
More details about these events will be added when they are available. Please contact Jose Calderon, executive director of the Haskell Foundation, if you have any questions.
Venue
Oberseestrasse 10, 8640 Rapperswil
The hackathon takes place at the beautiful Rapperswil-Jona campus of OST (formerly HSR), about 40 minutes outside of Zürich city:
The venue is located right next to the lake, and weather has been superb (25°C, 77℉) during the pre-COVID19 years, so feel free to bring your swimming gear!
Here is an interactive campus map, useful if you need to locate a specific building or room on the campus.
Accomodation
Where to stay
A well-known triathlon is taking place the same weekend in Rapperswil, so accomodation close to the venue is very hard to find.
What alternatives are there to Rapperswil?
The nearby city of Zurich has a huge capacity of hotels and accommodations of varying types. The public transport to Rapperswil is frequent, convenient, and fast: most of the organizers commute in from the greateer Zurich area. The following stations have direct train connections to Rapperswil every 30 minutes:
- Zurich Hardbrücke
- Zurich Hauptbahnhof
- Zurich Stadelhofen
- Zurich Oerlikon
- Zurich Altstetten
There are also many cities and towns around the lake area with fast and frequent connections to Rapperswil:
- Kaltbrunn
- Männedorf
- Meilen
- Pfäffikon SZ
- Stäfa
- Uetikon
- Uster
- Uznach
- Wädenswil
- Wattwil
- Wetzikon
- …
During previous years, attendees have also shared accomodation (e.g. on
Airbnb). In order to get in touch with
fellow attendees, we recommend using the #accomodation channel
in our Discord (which you can join upon registration).
If weather allows for it, camping is also a very affordable and beautiful option for the ultimate grassroots ZuriHac festival fans. Several people have stayed at this campsite since 2017.
Getting to the venue
How to get there by train
We recommend attendees to use public transportation. You can take the S5, S7 or S15 trains to get from the Zürich main station to Rapperswil. These trains run regularly in 30 minute intervals.
What train tickets do I need?
If you stay in Zürich city, the easiest option is to get a 24 hour pass for all zones. It's good for all public transportation around Zürich, up to Rapperswil. A one-way ticket costs 17.20CHF, the 24 hour pass 34.40CHF.
Please note that the 24 hour pass is literally a 24 hour pass and can be used over multiple days: e.g. if you buy one on the first day of the Hackathon at e.g. 9.00 AM, you can still use it to take the train at 8.00 AM the next day. This way, it is possible to buy only two tickets for the three-day conference.
A lightly cheaper alternative to the 24 hour pass is the 9 O'Clock day pass which works more like a regular day pass. However, this requires you to take the train to Rapperswil after 09:00 AM on weekdays, as described on the website.
You can buy tickets from the SBB or ZVV vending machines, which have a button to use them in English rather than German on the home screen. Alternatively, you can use the SBB website, SBB mobile app on Android or iOS.
How to get there by car
There are some paid public parking lots in walking distance from the campus (see here for a map). It can be difficult to find a free parking spot in these lots, and you can expect to pay about CHF 20 per day. We therefore recommend that you come via public transport if possible.
Supported by
Community Partners
About
Contact
The main organizers for ZuriHac 2026 are Jasper Van der Jeugt, Farhad Mehta and Alex Drake. Additional key people include Andreas Herrmann, Benjamin Plattner, Bieke Hoefkens, Cazim Hysi, Jeremy Stucki, John Rodewald, Lukas Buchli, Mario Aeberhard, Olivier Lischer, Raphael Das Gupta, Silvan Hegner, and Vaibhav Sagar.
If you have any questions before the event, please reach out to to the organizers. You can also interact with us on our social media accounts: Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter.
Terms
Intellectual property: Each participant will retain ownership of any and all intellectual and industrial property rights to their work created or used during the Hackathon.
Code of Conduct: ZuriHac uses the Berlin Code of Conduct.
Photo Policy: The organizers as well as other participants may take photos during the event to use on social media, blogs and websites. We encourage this, as promoting the event helps our goal of bringing more people into the Haskell community. On the other hand, we want to respect the privacy of the attendees. Therefore, we ask everyone to be mindful and request explicit permission before taking pictures where people are clearly recognizable in the foreground.