I’m super excited about our next tech talk.  This time around, our very own Dave King, a Software Developer working on our Cloud Control Panel, will be presenting on Functional Programming on the Web.  Dave has worked at Rackspace for a couple years now and prides himself as the only Penn State alumni at Rackspace in Blacksburg.  To learn more about Dave, check out his blog [http://www.davehking.com/wordpress/].

As was previously mentioned, the topic of this talk is functional programming.  Functional programming is a style of programming that emphasizes operations over data types.  Languages such as Haskell, Lisp, and ML have been used in academia for years.  Recently new languages such as Scala, Erlang, and Clojure have emerged for handling the challenges of high-scalability systems.  Additionally, features from functional languages have started to be incorporated into mainstream languages and functional paradigms are common in JavaScript, the main technology for client-side wide behavior.

This talk will give an overview of functional programming and show how programmers of any background can benefit from adding a functional language to their repertoire.  He will also demonstrate how functional languages have enabled rapid prototyping of tools used internally to assist software development at Rackspace.

This talk will again be on the Virginia Tech campus.  Students, Professors, Professionals, Rackers, and anyone else interested in talking code for a couple hours are invited.  Look forward to seeing you there.

Where:   Torgersen Hall 1020 (Click here for a campus map)

When:    Thursday April 28th, 6:30pm – 8:00pm

Food:      Pizza

• Senior Software Developer - The Rackspace Cloud Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Sr. Software Developer - Rackspace Email Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Software Developer-Test II/III - Compute Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Billing Systems Specialist Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Software Developer in Test II Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Senior Cloud Control Panel Developer Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Sr. Software Developer - Cloud Servers Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Software Developer II - US Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Sr C# Developer Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)
• Linux Systems Engineer Job (Blacksburg, VA, 24060, US)

Brian started at Rackspace in 2007 as part of the Webmail.us aquisition.  Throughout his time at Rackspace and Webmail.us, he has worked in a variety of roles within engineering.  Starting as a part-time software developer while in college at Virginia Tech, he is now a software development manager.  Most recently, Brian and his teams have worked on the Email & Apps Control Panel.  This application provides the administrative UI for all the Email & Apps services.

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