In last month or so I did three talks on F# in Poland. I can see gaining interests and there’re already other people speaking about F# in Polish community. This is awesome!
Kraków, 25th September
A Day before DevDay KGD.NET organized meetup with two talks. This was great opportunity for my employer tretton37 to get some more street cred in Poland, so we decided to sponsor some food and drinks. There were two speakers – me and Maciej Aniserowicz, who’s kind of a rock star of Polish .NET community (BTW, check out his new podcast (in Polish)). I did my already well known introduction talk to F#. I had quite a big audience (around 100 people) and they were very engaged. I enjoyed great question and feedback I got after the talk. Looks like it’s very active .NET group. I used the same slides and code as in Warsaw couple months before.
Next dey was a DevDay :). I’m big fan of this conference and it delivered again. There were a lot of semi-negative opinions on the Internet afterwards, which is very sad and unfair. Looks like DevDay became victim of its own success. Last year was fuckin awesome, and people had some overgrown expectations. The truth is, it was fuckin awesome again this time and I can’t wait for next year’s edition. Videos are already online and you can watch them on youtube. But the strongest point of DevDay for me is community impact. It made largely distributed Polish .NET scene more united. People are visiting each other’s group and exchange experiences and knowledge. Programmers from all around Poland know each other better and lot’s of credit for that goes to Michał and Rafał.
Interwebz, 18th October
On Saturday evening I did a talk on Polish virtual conference dotnetconf.pl. From statistics I could see there were about 70 people watching it live. It’s a little bit weird to talk to computer without seeing your audience. I’m not happy how this talk went, but you can judge by yourself, because it’s been recorded (Polish). Feedback I got afterwards kind of matched my expectations – 24 positive, 16 neutral and 2 negative opinions. Again – same slides and code as in Warsaw.
This was the second edition of dotnetconfpl, great initiative by Michał, Paweł and Jakub. It’s Saturday afternoon full of code. Made by Polish developers for Polish developers. And because it was virtual, I could do talk from my desk in Sweden. I also very enjoyed discussions that went on whole day on dedicated jabbr channel.
Poznan, 30th October, PolyConf
Few days ago I did completely new talk. This time about cross-platform mobile development with F# and Xamarin. So this was new talk, and also my first talk in English, and biggest audience so far. Lot’s of new experiences. I was quite nervous before, but seems like everything went well. I’ll see video in a couple of days to make sure, but right now I feel it was my best talk so far.
The conference itself is evolution of well known RuPY. This time they widen topics to other programmic languages, so you could witness talks on JavaScript, Haskell, Erlang or F#. Pretty cool experience, and lot’s of inspiration how to move concept from other technologies to my daily job. The conference, even though it was hosted in Poland, gathered mostly international crowd. I’m putting it on my calendar for next year, because really enjoyed it.
What’s really cool and makes me happy, there’re other people who start talking about F# in Polish community. Few weeks ago my friend Kuba Walinski asked me if he can reference my talk, as he’s gonna do his own about F#. Hell yeah, you can. It’s great that we’re spreading F# love :). He spoke at Developer Days in Wrocław and you can read his thoughts about it on his blog.
There’re some other F# events coming up in Poland, so I’m thinking about starting some kind of Polish Monthly F# news, similar to Sergey’s weekly news, but focusing on our local community. Stay tuned :).