Functional Programming and a journey to F#

Hopefully this blog will help anyone considering functional programming understand some routes to skill up. This is in fact a brief history of my year journey to Functional Programming and F#.

My first project

During a company hackathon I wanted to see if we could address customer queries with a set of key responses. The idea was to analyse customer queries and respond appropriately. The key behind this was to do sentiment analysis on the text of the query.

I approached this in a way of categorising words and terms. I was able to do this fairly easily by using Stanford Universtity NLP and a training set created by me. In addition to this I had to correct spelling and learn new slang or alternative words this was possible using NHunspell, The end result was a flow similar to this.

This was a fairly linear process until the validation of sentiment begins. When you begin to look at sentiment you have lots of variations (Sad, Anger, Happy, Fun). Working in imperative code at this point I ended up with lots of interfaces and different implementations of validation. The code started to get messy and complicated I thought there must be a better way?

By the way I won the hackathon ;)

Scala

After some research on my project I found that many developers were using Functional programming to achieve machine learning projects. To give myself an introduction in 2014 I attended a course at City University in London focused on Functional Programming and Scala. Whilst this course was well priced and  and informative for a beginner as a full time developer I found the pace a little slow. That said it was still enough to interest me and continue me research.

Coursera 
To recall the reason for my interest in functional programming was to solve machine learning problems. During this journey I took a free course on Coursera run by Stanford university.

Challenges

Sadly the journey of learning a new language or in this case paradigm isn't always easy. While languages can create interest being able to apply them in your regular career can be a challenge. Working for a .NET house the introduction of Scala would always be hard also from experience introducing new languages can often result in poor code bases for all.

F#

Never one to give up along comes F# a .NET language that lets me build on skills I already have and in addition it interops seamlessly with my C# code. This allows me to start writing code in F# without starting new projects.

I read "Functional Programming for the Real World"  which I highly recommend. The language used in this book makes it easy to understand coming from a C# background.

This book taught me the basics but in the last month I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to take part in Tomas Petricek and Phil Trelford's  Fast track to FSharp. This has really concreted my understand with lots of real world style applications and examples. The course is expensive but if you are a .NET developer and want to introduce functional programming it is worth it.

Journey Continues

My journey continues with F# as I start to attempt to introduce it in Testing and Domain modelling first.

But for some of you the journey might not have ended at F# and you might want to consider other languages for your functional needs. if that's the case I highly recommend investigating Haskell and Erlang.

Developing Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps

Why now?
//Build/ 2015 peaked my interest in the Windows app platform, something that had never happened before. This all comes down to the Universal Windows Platform. If you are unfamiliar with the Windows 10 UWP I suggest checking out. Below is a link to a brief article which explains some of the benefits. In short one development lifecycle to create an application for all Windows 10 platforms.

Guide to Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps

I thought I would have a dabble at the developer experience and this is the result. Think Tinder for cats. Using the thecatapi.com API I was able to creating a simple swipe and vote app for random cats.

What made it so easy?

I opted for the C# environment being my usual language. Firstly that brought all my current experience of .NET with me. In addition sadly in the past I did some Silverlight development and become familiar with XAML. With some help from the abundance of sample apps released by Microsoft for the Windows 10 SDK I was up and running in moments.

Down side

Being on the bleeding edge of development means sometimes you get cut. Sadly after a few hours of putting my app together I wanted to share the fun. At this point my good experience ended as I struggled to figure out how to submit my app. I finally read the statement on the guide "The Store is not currently open for the submission of Windows 10 apps." boooo!.

Whats next?

• Wait to be able to publish the app.
• Explore the Device contracts what is possible in each platform.
• Have fun making some more silly apps.
• Create a more complete tutorial of developing UWP apps.

Waltham Forest Tech Meetup

Recently I moved house all the way to sunny Zone 4 in London/Essex (Waltham Forest is still London). While I love the suburbs of London I found it increasingly difficult to juggle getting home and attending technical Meetups. Missing out on maintaining my skills by putting myself in challenging environments with other tech minded people. 

Rather than accepting my fate as a legacy developer in the leafy suburbs,  I have decided that I would start my own Meetup. I cannot be the only one after all.

Granted this all sounds a little dramatic for Zone 4. Especially when I'm talking about areas like Walthamstow, the new hipster location, move over Shoreditch... I cannot be the only techie feeling like this.

With out further adae I present to you Waltham Forest Tech. 

Waltham Forest Tech Meetup

First and foremost this is going to be friendly environment to share some knowledge and hopefully gain some. My Walthamstow utopia is where everyone understands software engineering and with that I promote that every passionate person comes along.

I'm looking to build a core group of people that are driven by learning or mentoring and somewhere you can come ask questions. In addition to this somewhere you can have a good beer :). Later with aspirations of host  hackathon and presentations where people are interested to do so.

So if you are local to Waltham Forest and want to meet likeminded people, develop skills and network please sign up and come along.

Sorry but no recruiters ;)