Presenting on F# at February Wisconsin INETA
Well, life has been a bit easier lately. The Liz is behaving herself. She makes it easy to be a Dad. She had a four day weekend off from school which she spent almost exclusively in her room. She's been sick and would probably would rather be out with friends. But she is focused on what matters. When she is focused, it frees up my time to be focused. Good girl and I love you for it Liz.
On that note, I'm presenting at the Wisconsin INETA meeting. The official presentation announcement was just posted. My presentation is on February 21st, 2006 and is titled publicly as:
An Introduction to F#
The official working title is:
F# - An Introduction under the Application of Quantitative Finance
I didn't want that posted on the INETA web site for fear that no one would show up. Seriously, this will be a fun session. This is my first presentation at Wisconsin INETA, my first public speaking on F# (see my blogroll for useful F# links) and my first public presentation in about six years. I'm not nervous, just excited. I tend to talk very quickly, so the usual comments that I hear from my friends and colleagues is "You are going to have to talk slower." That is not possible. Of course, I'm presenting during the same month as Don Haleyione, the Godfather of Interesting Finds, just in a different city. Those Beantown guys are going to get a dose of Debris and practical dissassembly. Nice.
((marketing hat on; warning, imprecise language in use))
If you are interested in investing in stocks, I'll be covering a few simple techniques to measure characteristics of those stocks. We'll build a few applications that use publicly available data from the major sources like finance.yahoo.com and others. I hope that anyone in attendance will get a flavor of F# and it's capabilities within the .NET framework as well as a perspective for some of the basic ideas used in quantitative finance (finance by the numbers). The target audience is the .NET developer and not the capital markets professional, so the ideas in finance are straightforward and simple to implement.
The part about this that has me excited is the use of F# to do this work. I've been using F# now since last summer (again, thanks to Marty for the pointer). Because F# is based on ML and OCaml, it was not unfamiliar to me, i.e. I had some competence in the language, but needed to improve my skills. That is still true now, but I've at least had the opportunity to build some real world stuff in F#. To me, F# represents the first core competence platform under .NET for scientific and engineering based computing that is (or may be) mathematics intensive.
I invite you to come and spend some time at this meeting. I hope that I can give some basic ideas on F# and it's usage, some basic ideas for the everyday .NET developer in finance and just have a lot of fun. In case you cannot decide whether to attend or not, I will mention that there will be free pizza and soda. How can you pass up an offer like that?
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