What is ZuriHac?

ZuriHac is the biggest Haskell community event in the world: a completely free, three-day grassroots coding festival co-organized by the Zürich Friends of Haskell and the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Science. It is not your standard conference with papers and presentations, but features fantastic keynotes, hands-on tracks, hacking on many of your favourite projects, and of course lots of socializing!

ZuriHac takes place Saturday 8 June — Monday 10 June 2024 as a physical event at the beautiful Rapperswil-Jona campus of OST located right next to lake Zürich. We hope to see you there!

Speakers

Ningning Xie
Ningning Xie

Ningning is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Her research focuses on functional programming languages and type systems.

Alex McLean
Alex McLean

Alex is a Research Fellow at non-profit studio Then Try This, and co-founder of the Algorave and TOPLAP live coding communities. He is the author of the TidalCycles live coding environment for music, implemented as a Haskell EDSL.

Ivan Perez
Ivan Perez

Ivan is the founder of Keera, a game studio using Haskell. He is known for his work around Functional Reactive Programming, and more recently, he has been working as a Senior Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center.

Mary Sheeran
Mary Sheeran

Mary is a professor at the Chalmers University of Technology. In her research, she applies ideas from functional programming to hardware design and high-performance computing.

Jesper Cockx
Jesper Cockx

Jesper is an assistant professor at the programming languages group at TU Delft, where he works on on dependently typed languages. He is one of the core contributors to Agda.

Schedule

ZuriHac is primarily a community event and a hackathon, rather than a conference. Aside from the talks and tracks, attendees are encouraged to work together on all sorts of Haskell-related open-source projects and socialize. Trying to attend everything may a bit too much, just pick what you find interesting!

Here is a list of projects participants are planning to work on—feel free to add your own!

This schedule is tentative and minor changes may still need to happen as we get closer to the event.

Start End Title LinkKind
2024-06-08T09:00:00+02:002024-06-08T10:00:00+02:00Registration Opens admin
2024-06-08T10:00:00+02:002024-06-08T11:00:00+02:00Talk talk
2024-06-08T11:00:00+02:002024-06-08T12:00:00+02:00Opening Presentation & Project Pitches admin
2024-06-08T13:00:00+02:002024-06-08T15:00:00+02:00Beginner Track beginner
2024-06-08T13:00:00+02:002024-06-08T15:00:00+02:00Advanced Track advanced
2024-06-08T17:00:00+02:002024-06-08T18:00:00+02:00Talk talk
2024-06-09T10:00:00+02:002024-06-09T11:00:00+02:00Talk talk
2024-06-09T13:00:00+02:002024-06-09T15:00:00+02:00Beginner Track beginner
2024-06-09T13:00:00+02:002024-06-09T15:00:00+02:00Advanced Track advanced
2024-06-09T17:00:00+02:002024-06-09T18:00:00+02:00Talk talk
2024-06-10T10:00:00+02:002024-06-10T11:00:00+02:00Talk talk
2024-06-10T13:00:00+02:002024-06-10T15:00:00+02:00Advanced Track advanced
2024-06-10T15:30:00+02:002024-06-10T17:00:00+02:00Project presentations admin

2024 Haskell Ecosystem Workshop

The Haskell Foundation, the OST Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, are organizing a two-day ecosystem workshop to be held immediately prior to Zurihac at the same venue. You can find more information and register for the event here.

Venue

OST, Campus Rapperswil
Oberseestrasse 10
8640 Rapperswil

OST

The hackathon takes place at the beautiful Rapperswil-Jona campus of OST (formerly HSR), about 40 minutes outside of Zürich city:

The venue is located right next to the lake, and weather has been superb (25°C, 77℉) during the pre-COVID19 years, so feel free to bring your swimming gear!

Getting There

How to get there by train

We recommend attendees to use public transportation. You can take the S5, S7 or S15 trains to get from the Zürich main station to Rapperswil. These trains run regularly in 30 minute intervals.

What train tickets do I need?

If you stay in Zürich city, the easiest option is to get a 24 hour pass for all zones. It's good for all public transportation around Zürich, up to Rapperswil. A one-way ticket costs 17.20CHF, the 24 hour pass 34.40CHF.

Please note that the 24 hour pass is literally a 24 hour pass and can be used over multiple days: e.g. if you buy one on the first day of the Hackathon at e.g. 9.00 AM, you can still use it to take the train at 8.00 AM the next day. This way, it is possible to buy only two tickets for the three-day conference.

A lightly cheaper alternative to the 24 hour pass is the 9 O'Clock day pass which works more like a regular day pass. However, this requires you to take the train to Rapperswil after 09:00 AM on weekdays, as described on the website.

You can buy tickets from the SBB or ZVV vending machines, which have a button to use them in English rather than German on the home screen. Alternatively, you can use the SBB website, SBB mobile app on Android or iOS.

How to get there by car

There are some paid public parking lots in walking distance from the campus (see here for a map). It can be difficult to find a free parking spot in these lots, and you can expect to pay about CHF 20 per day. We therefore recommend that you come via public transport if possible.

Accomodation

Where to stay

The accommodation situation in and around Rapperswil is, unfortunately like every year, tight. Summer, regardless of the weekend, is a very popular time in the area, with something or the other always going on.

What alternatives are there to Rapperswil?

The nearby city of Zurich has a much larger capacity of hotels and accommodations of varying types. The public transport to Rapperswil is frequent, convenient, and fast. The following stations have direct train connections to Rapperswil every 30 minutes:

  • Zurich Hardbrücke
  • Zurich Hauptbahnhof
  • Zurich Stadelhofen
  • Zurich Oerlikon
  • Zurich Altstetten

During previous years, attendees have also shared accomodation (e.g. on Airbnb). In order to get in touch with fellow attendees, we recommend using the #accomodation channel in our Discord (which you can join upon registration).

If weather allows for it, camping is also a very affordable and beautiful option for the ultimate grassroots ZuriHac festival fans. Several people have stayed at this campsite since 2017.

Supported by

IOG Jane Street OST Tweag I/O Valora .digital Well-Typed

Community Partners

BOB Konf Haskell Foundation Swiss Dev Jobs
We are still looking for sponsors for this year's event! Since we atttract many strong functional programmers from all over the world, it is an excellent place to do recruiting. Please contact zurihac at zfoh.ch for more info. Individual donations are accepted as well.

About

Contact

The main organizers for ZuriHac 2024 are Jasper Van der Jeugt, Farhad Mehta and Alex Drake. Additional key people include Adam Bratschi-Kaye, Andreas Herrmann, Benjamin Plattner, Bieke Hoefkens, Eliane Schmidli, Felix Morgner, Jeremy Stucki. John Rodewald, Lucia Kundig, Lukas Buchli, Olivier Lischer, Raphael Das Gupta, Raphael Rotondari, Roman Cviljanovic, and Timon Erhart.

If you have any questions before the event, please reach out to to the organizers. We also monitor our official Twitter account.

Legal

Each participant will retain ownership of any and all intellectual and industrial property rights to their work created or used during the Hackathon.

ZuriHac uses the Berlin Code of Conduct.