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!