Pandera Labs Hosts Kick-off of Chicago Functional Programming Meetup

The Thursday before Thanksgiving, Pandera Labs hosted twenty-odd guests for the inaugural meeting of the Chicago Functional Programming Meetup. This newly minted group brings together Chicagoans of all stripes interested in learning more about functional programming (FP) techniques across a variety of languages.

Organizer Andy Hamilton from Spantree led the discussion, starting us off by going around the room to talk about our backgrounds and why we were interested in FP. The group was pretty diverse technically, ranging from backend developers digging into Scala, Clojure, and Haskell, to front-end developers who discovered FP through React/Redux, Ramda.js, or Elm. A quick show of hands revealed that the group was evenly split between self-identified beginners and intermediates. (No-one was bold enough to claim expert status.)

Reasons for attending varied, but a common theme was that we were all excited to learn and hoped to find more opportunities to use functional techniques in our day jobs. The best way to learn is by doing, so we’re looking for ways to get our hands dirty in future meetups. Some ideas pitched for this include going through a real-world FP code-base as a group to talk about how it’s put together, or to do some mob programming to try to refactor procedural code to be more functional.

Our current plan is to hold our next meetup after the holidays. If you’d like to get involved, come join us at Meetup.com. We’re also active on the Chicago Tech Slack in the #fp room.