[racket] Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2013: Call for Presentations

			     Workshop for
	   Commercial Users of Functional Programming 2013
			 Sponsored by SIGPLAN
			      CUFP 2013
		      Co-located with ICFP 2013
		      Boston, MA, United States
			      Sep 22-24
	   Talk Proposal Submission Deadline: 29 June 2013

The annual CUFP workshop is a place where people can see how others
are using functional programming to solve real world problems; where
practitioners meet and collaborate; where language designers and users
can share ideas about the future of their favorite language; and where
one can learn practical techniques and approaches for putting
functional programming to work.

Giving a CUFP Talk
==================

If you have experience using functional languages in a practical
setting, we invite you to submit a proposal to give a talk at the
workshop. We are looking for both experience reports and in-depth
technical talks.

Experience reports are typically 25 minutes long (but negotiable), and
aim to inform participants about how functional programming plays out
in real-world applications, focusing especially on lessons learned and
insights gained. Experience reports don't need to be highly technical;
reflections on the commercial, management, or software engineering
aspects are, if anything, more important.

Technical talks are also 25 minutes long (also negotiable), and should
focus on teaching the audience something about a particular technique
or methodology, from the point of view of someone who has seen it play
out in practice. These talks could cover anything from techniques for
building functional concurrent applications, to managing dynamic
reconfigurations, to design recipes for using types effectively in
large-scale applications. While these talks will often be based on a
particular language, they should be accessible to a broad range of
programmers.

If you are interested in offering a talk, or nominating someone to do
so, send an e-mail to marius(at)twitter(dot)com or
sperber(at)deinprogramm(dot)de or by 29 June 2013 with a short
description of what you'd like to talk about or what you think your
nominee should give a talk about. Such descriptions should be about
one page long.

There will be a short scribes report of the presentations and
discussions but not of the details of individual talks, as the meeting
is intended to be more a discussion forum than a technical
interchange. You do not need to submit a paper, just a proposal for
your talk! Note that we will need all presenters to register for the
CUFP workshop and travel to Boston at their own expense.

Program Committee
=================

    Marius Eriksen (Twitter, Inc), co-chair
    Mike Sperber (Active Group), co-chair
    Mary Sheeran (Chalmers)
    Andres Löh (Well-Typed)
    Thomas Gazagnaire (OCamlPro)
    Steve Vinoski (Basho)
    Jorge Ortiz (Foursquare, Inc.)
    Blake Matheny (Tumblr, Inc.)
    Simon Marlow (Facebook, Inc.)

More information
================

For more information on CUFP, including videos of presentations from
previous years, take a look at the CUFP website at
http://cufp.org. Note that presenters, like other attendees, will need
to register for the event. Presentations will be video taped and
presenters will be expected to sign an ACM copyright release
form. Acceptance and rejection letters will be sent out by July 16th.

Guidance on giving a great CUFP talk
====================================

Focus on the interesting bits: Think about what will distinguish your
talk, and what will engage the audience, and focus there. There are a
number of places to look for those interesting bits.

Setting: FP is pretty well established in some areas, including formal
verification, financial processing and server-side web-services. An
unusual setting can be a source of interest. If you're deploying
FP-based mobile UIs or building servers on oil rigs, then the
challenges of that scenario are worth focusing on. Did FP help or
hinder in adapting to the setting?

Technology: The CUFP audience is hungry to learn about how FP
techniques work in practice. What design patterns have you applied,
and to what areas? Did you use functional reactive programming for
user interfaces, or DSLs for playing chess, or fault-tolerant actors
for large scale geological data processing? Teach us something about
the techniques you used, and why we should consider using them
ourselves.

Getting things done: How did you deal with large software development
in the absence of a myriad of pre-existing support that are often
expected in larger commercial environments (IDEs, coverage tools,
debuggers, profilers) and without larger, proven bodies of libraries? 
Did you hit any brick walls that required support from the community?

Don't just be a cheerleader: It's easy to write a rah-rah talk about
how well FP worked for you, but CUFP is more interesting when the
talks also spend time on what doesn't work. Even when the results were
all great, you should spend more time on the challenges along the way
than on the parts that went smoothly.