Aug 31 2009
Edinburgh Haskell Hackathon went quite well
The International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) is taking place this week in Edinburgh. A substantial group of attendees are Haskell programmers and researchers, so it seemed a good idea to organise a Hackathon to work on libraries, infrastructure tools and various bits that everybody can use.
Eric Kow was the driving force behind this, and he managed to get us use of the conference facilities on Sunday, while there were a couple of workshops happening elsewhere in the building.
We didn’t have anywhere definite arranged for Saturday, so I went scouting a couple of weeks ago and identified a couple of places that would be suitable. I emailed and phoned Henderson’s and they weren’t horrified by the idea. We spent the day there, making sure to buy enough coffees to keep the management happy. There were 8 or 9 of us at the busiest point and we got some pretty amused/strange looks from other customers: a crowded table of people all with laptops open, ignoring each other…
In the evening we went out restaurant-hunting, which I don’t recommend in these circumstances — 9 people, Saturday night, Edinburgh festival, centre of town, no booking. I tried calling Calistoga (their number was still in my phone) as they’re both spacious and hidden from the tourists but they couldn’t take us either. We eventually found an Indian restaurant that would take us, so we idled in the pub across the road while they got ready for us.
On Sunday we were using the ICFP conference facilities, deep in the bowels of the Royal College of Physicians on Queen Street. It was a nice room, with little groups of tables, plenty of extension blocks for powering laptops, a flip chart and a projector. We even had wifi, though the networking infrastructure died a few times from heavy use. We were running off a separate system from the rest of the conference centre and their wireless access died, so there was an influx of random conference-goers looking for net access, which brought our wifi to its knees too. I had felt slightly guilty about taking people to a cafe with dodgy wifi the day before, but in fact the conference centre had an even less reliable connection! :-)
My sincere thanks to the staff of Henderson’s for putting up with us, to Graeme Hutton and Philip Wadler for getting us a room in the conference venue on Sunday, to Eric for doing all his organisation and to everybody who actually came along.
I’m putting a call out to everyone that attended to let me know what they did and so on. More updates when I hear back from them.
2 Responses to “Edinburgh Haskell Hackathon went quite well”
Finding somewhere to eat for more than 2 people during the Festival is a serious challenge. Well done.
Presumably, conference centres and the like can get wifi servers (I use the term loosely in the absence of another better word) that are big and wide, to handle all that traffic… they MUST exist?? Either the RCP are cheapskates on technology (likely) or they don’t exist but should.
Did Hendersons have wifi and if so did it stay up?
I think the main wifi connection was fine but the upstream (cough BT) had failed. For some reason the wifi in the basement was on JANET and so it still worked. But our wireless access point was a home router that really couldn’t cope…
Henderson’s wifi was not the most reliable but cafes rarely are. It was no worse than the conference facilities :-)