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Reintroducing Community for F#

02 Feb 2014

tl/dr: Community for F# has a brand-new page at www.c4fsharp.net – with links to a ton of recorded F# presentations, as well as F# hands-on Dojos and material. Check it out, and let us know on Twitter what you think, and what you want us to do next… and spread the word!

If you are into F# and don’t know Community for F#, you are missing out! Community for F#, aka C4FSharp, is the brainchild of Ryan Riley. Ryan has been running C4FSharp tirelessly for years, making great content available online for the F# community.

The idea of C4FSharp is particularly appealing to me, because in my opinion, it serves a very important role. The F# community is amazingly active and friendly, but has an interesting challenge: it is highly geographically dispersed. As a result, it is often difficult to attend presentations locally, or, if you organize Meetups, to find speakers.

Ryan has been doing a phenomenal job addressing that issue, by regularly organizing online live presentations, and making them available offline as well, so that no matter where you are, you can access all that great content. The most visible result is an amazing treasure trove of F# videos on Vimeo, going back all the way to 2010. While I am giving credit where credit is due, special hats off to Rick Minerich, who has been recording the NYC meetings since forever, and making them available on Vimeo as well – and also has been lending a helping hand when C4FSharp needed assistance. Long story short, Rick is just an all-around fantastic guy, so… thanks, Rick!

In any case, the question of how to help grow the F# community has been on my mind quite a bit recently, so I was very excited when Ryan accepted to try working on this as a team, and put our ideas together. The direction I am particularly interested in is to provide support for local groups to grow. Online is great, but nothing comes close to having a good old fashioned meeting with like-minded friends to discuss and learn. So one thing I would like to see happen is for C4FSharp to become a place where you can find resources to help you guys start and run your own local group. While running a Meetup group does take a bit of effort, it’s not nearly as complicated as what people think it is, and it is very fun and rewarding. So if you want to see F# meetings in your area, just start a Meetup group!

In that frame, Ryan has put together a brand-new web page at www.c4fsharp.net, where we started listing resources. The existing videos, of course, but also a repository of hands-on Dojos and presentation/workshop material. The hands-on Dojos is something we started doing in the San Francisco meetups last year, and  has been working really well. Instead of a classic presentation, the idea is to create a fun coding problem, sit down in groups and work on it, learn from each other, and share. It’s extremely fun, and, from a practical standpoint, it’s also very convenient, because you don’t need to fly in a speaker to present. Just grab the repository from GitHub, look at the instructions, and run with it!

Just to whet your appetite, here is a small selection of the amazing images that came out of running the Fractal Forest Dojo in Nashville and San Francisco this month:

… and special mention goes to @Luketopia, for his FunScript Fractal Generator!

What’s next? We have a ton of ideas on what we could do. We will obviously add more resources as we go – but we would really like to hear from you guys. So help us make Community for F# the resource you would like to have! Here is what we would like from you:

In short – we intend to make C4FSharp the best resource we can make it for local F# communities, and we would love your input and help on how to make that happen!

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