Matthew Watt
Software Engineer, Omnitech
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, United States
Actions
Matthew is passionate about helping you discover what gets you excited and how to find ways to pursue it. He calls it "finding your itch and scratching it". Matthew is a full-stack software engineer at Omnitech. His "itch" for mobile app development, especially Swift and Apple platforms, is what kickstarted his career on the native apps team at Panera Bread. After a while, the "itch" for mobile apps faded, leaving him feeling bored and burned out, but that didn't stop him from skilling up. Through various jobs, he has gained experience in React, React Native, Vue.js, Node.js, TypeScript, C#, Rust, ASP.NET Core, SQL, and so many other technologies. Eventually, he discovered his new itch: functional programming.
These days, learning, applying, and teaching functional programming - especially F# and Haskell - has become a passion and focus of his professional time and energy. He loves speaking at conferences, writing blog posts, whiteboarding with colleagues, explaining concepts and ideas, and seeing others have their "aha" moment.
In his free time, he enjoys spending quality time with his wife and their cats, learning and applying new technologies, building personal projects, contributing to open source projects, and playing the trombone with the Augustana University trombone choir.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Smatterings of F#
You're a C# developer and you love it. .NET is your bread and butter, and rightly so - C# and .NET are awesome! But did you know that .NET is more than just C# (and VB 🙂)?
Have you heard of this little programming language called F#? Maybe you have, and you love it as much as I do. Maybe you have, but you've got C#, so why bother? Maybe you have, and maybe you really like the ideas, but you work in a "C# shop" and your team members just can't be convinced. Maybe you've never heard of F# at all!
Whoever you are, I welcome you! In this talk, I hope to address everyone I have described.
If you love F# as much as I do, you'll be inspired to keep finding ways to scratch that F# itch, however you can!
If you are a C# fanatic, you'll see that different ways of thinking about programming can help you be better at the things you're already doing...and that there are useful tools outside of our beloved C# 🙂
If you're a secret F# admirer in a world of C# developers, you'll discover that to use F# effectively, you don't need the title of "F# developer" at work, nor do you need to convince everyone on your team that they should convert all their C# to F#. F# lawyers - you can rest!
In this talk, we're going to look at the ways I use smatterings of F# here and there to scratch my itch - and give back to the community!
- We'll look at my blog and how, though it is primarily Astro, I used F# to build a basic commenting system, as well as some other useful frontend components - all without having to completely convert everything!
- We'll look at some of my open source contributions, which are proof that you don't need to do anything groundbreaking to get started. Bored? See some missing functionality or documentation in a library you use a lot? Get forking!
- We'll look at how I stay connected with the developer community - Discord, of all things! Let's be honest, life gets hectic sometimes. This summer has been pretty crazy for me, which means I haven't been able to be as involved in working on personal projects, contributing to open source, blogging, or speaking as much as I would have liked. In this season, I've found that even lurking in the F# Discord has helped me stay connected and inspired to pick the torch back up when things settle down for me.
I hope to see you there!
Functional Programming: More than just a coding style
"Why in the world would I write code like this??" I asked myself, as I scratched my head.
It was the first time I had tried to learn functional programming. To me, it seemed like it was a stylistic choice for programming that was bizarre for no good reason. Do the folks inventing this stuff just like to seem smart and leave the rest of us fools to flounder with our object-oriented and imperative languages? What am I missing?
Eventually, I had my "aha" moment.
In this session, we'll walk through five key learnings from my journey learning functional programming -- five fundamental approaches to building software that I believe make a strong case for the value in learning, applying, and teaching functional programming. By the end of this session, functional programming won't be a wizard's ancient magic -- it will be a valuable and accessible tool that anyone can utilize to write great software!
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top