Tis’ still the Season for yearly retrospectives, and making foolish predictions or commitments; here is a very incomplete and disorganized review of my year 2013 with F#, and some of my take-aways for the year ahead. 2013 has been a CRAZY year for me. I used to be proud of myself when I gave one talk per quarter – this is the map of places where I gave F# presentations / Dojos this year (note that I spoke multiple times in some of these places, and some online talks are not listed…): So yes, it’s been a[...]

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure to attend Progressive F# Tutorials in NYC. The conference was fantastic – two days of hands-on workshops, great organization by the good folks at SkillsMatter, Rickasaurus and Paul Blasucci, and a great opportunity to exchange with like-minded people, catch up with old friends and make new ones. As an aside, if you missed NYC, fear not – you can still get tickets for Progressive F# Tutorials in London, coming up October 31 and November 1 in London. After some discu[...]

Recently, Cesar De Souza began moving his .NET machine learning library, Accord.NET, from Google Code to GitHub. The move is still in progress, but that motivated me to take a closer look at the library; given that it is built in C#, with an intended C# usage in mind, I wanted to see how usable it is from F#. There is a lot in the library; as a starting point, I decided I would try out its Support Vector Machine (SVM), a classic machine learning algorithm, and run it on a classic problem, automatically rec[...]

I have been back for about a week now, after nearly three weeks on the road, talking about F# all over the US. The first day I woke up in my own bed, my first thought was “where am I again? And where am I speaking tonight?”, now life is slowly getting back to normal, and I thought it would be a good time to share some impressions from the trip. I am very proud to have inaugurated two new F# meetup groups during that trip! The Washington DC F# meetup, organized by @devshorts, is off to a great start, we ha[...]

About a month ago, FSharp.Data  released version 1.1.9, which contains some very nice improvements – you can find them listed on Gustavo Guerra’s blog. I was particularly excited by the changes made to the CSV Type Provider, because they make my life digging through datasets even simpler, but couldn’t find the time to write about it, because of my recent cross-country peregrinations. Now that I am back, let’s talk about why this update made me so happy, with a concrete example. My latest week-end project [...]