A few of us from Quicken had attended LambdaJam in Chicago.  By the way, it was a great conference–big kudos to Alex Miller. Anyway, at that conference we met Mathias Brandewinder, a Microsoft F# MVP from San Francisco.  Some of the guys started talking to Mathias about visiting us here in Motown to spread the F# goodness.

One thing lead to another and we were able to get him to come here.  John Fair, myself, and a few others interested in F# were talking about what we could do to make his visit most effective for teaching folks around here about F#.  I had been running an F# user group here till around 2011 or so.  I’ve run a few user groups in my time and I can tell you that they often end up being a major chore and by 2011 I was just kind of tired of being in charge of things.  But this time John and the others volunteered to lead the effort so it was hard to argue with.

At any rate, Mathias lead a machine learning coding dojo and it just blew us all away–how much fun it was.  To tell you the truth I was sort of skeptical–I mean how much can one learn about machine learning and its algorithms and techniques in one short session.  But there was a lot there and we had a great time.

Kudos to Mathias for leading an awesome session and to John and those other F# folks who got him to join us and set up the session.

Here are some pics I took at the meetup:

Some of the fellows at the first F# meetup

Some of the fellows standing around chatting