Write your own Excel in 100 lines of F#

I've been teaching F# for over seven years now, both in the public F# FastTrack course that we run at SkillsMatter in London and in various custom trainings for private companies. Every time I teach the F# FastTrack course, I modify the material in one way or another. I wrote about some of this interesting history last year in an fsharpWorks article. The course now has a stable half-day introduction to the language and a stable focus on the ideas behind functional-first programming, but there are always new examples and applications that illustrate this style of programming.

When we started, we mostly focused on teaching functional programming concepts that might be useful even if you use C# and on building analytical components that your could integrate into a larger .NET solution. Since then, the F# community has matured, established the F# Software Foundation, but also built a number of mature end-to-end ecosystems that you can rely on such as Fable, the F# to JavaScript compiler, and SAFE Stack for full-stack web development.

For the upcoming December course in London, I added a number of demos and hands-on tasks built using Fable, partly because running F# in a browser is an easy way to illustrate many concepts and partly because Fable has some amazing functional-first libraries.

If you are interested in learning F# and attending our course, the next F# FastTrack takes place on 6-7 December in London at SkillsMatter. We also offer custom on-site trainings. Get in touch at @tomaspetricek or email tomas@tomasp.net for a 10% discount for the course.

One of the new samples I want to show, which I also live coded at NDC 2018, is building a simple web-based Excel-like spreadsheet application. The spreadsheet demonstrates all the great F# features such as domain modeling with types, the power of compositionality and also how functional-first approach can be amazingly powerful for building user interfaces.

Hello New York. Learn some F#!

Exactly two weeks ago, I started a three month internship at BlueMountain Capital in New York. They have a technical blog and should be well known to the F# community thanks to the R type provider which was written by Howard Mansell (@hmansell). I'll have the pleasure of working with Howard on some more open source data-science related tools for F# (and C#). I'll write more about these when we have something to share, but if you want to contribute and help us, join the Data and Machine Learning working group at F# Foundation.

Aside from my work, I'm also happy to get involved with the great F# community in New York! We already have some events planned - Progressive F# Tutorials and FastTrack to F# are scheduled for September 16.-19. so you can become an F# guru in 4 days :-). But I'm also happy to have a chat with anyone interested in F# and perhaps do a lunch time talk, if you need to convince your colleagues or boss that F# is a good choice.

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