Banner that links to Serokell Shop. You can buy cool FP T-shirts there!

We’re seeking an experienced software engineer to supervise a team of Haskell developers.

We Are Hiring a Haskell Team Lead

Serokell is a fast-growing, fully-remote software development company that works on innovative solutions for complex problems in fields like biotech and data science. We’re packed full of adventurous, curious, and inclusive folks that want to build cutting-edge software with modern technologies like functional programming.

We’re seeking an experienced software engineer to supervise a team of Haskell developers. Our work is not only limited to Haskell development, so you will sometimes have to delve into and supervise other fantastic things, such as **research**, **frontend,** or **packaging**.


## **Duties**

Your primary responsibility will be to be the leader of a Haskell devotee team; the person eager to **review solutions**, **advise**, and **propose your own ideas**.

As a team lead, you will be responsible for:

*   **weekly** **status updates** and **monthly reports** to the customer
*   reviewing **PRs** and modifying code if necessary
*   assessing every member of your team by providing **fair** **feedback**
*   helping **team members** achieve their career goals
*   evaluating **top candidates** in case of team expansion
*   supervising **research** in the project you're leading


## **Requirements**

*   **solid understanding** of Haskell or a **strong will** to learn it
*   previous **experience** with managing software development teams
*   **spine of steel** for robust software development
*   **capacity** to review a lot of code
*   **determination** to manage issues
*   **openness** to new languages – be it Elixir, OCaml, or TypeScript.

Last but not least! We hope you like **Nix** as much as we do. We use Nix for plenty of things, although we do sometimes use other platforms like Docker too. Luckily, we have a dedicated team of Nix experts who are always happy to help.

By joining Serokell, you’ll become a part of a warm community of ingenious engineers, computer scientists, designers, marketing experts, and other inventive people. You will be able to take part in ambitious projects that work on building the next generation of computer software, try out crazy initiatives unhindered by bureaucracy or judgment, and have fun in our Slack channels that range from #music to #butthurt (did we mention the huge custom emoji set?).

If you’re ready for the adventure of your life, contact us via email: jobs@serokell.io.

Serokell at TQuorum NY 2019

What’s the future of Tezos? Is it Haskell? Learn more about our adventures at TQuorum New York.

At the end of September, we participated in the main Tezos event of the year: TQuorum Global Summit New York. 

TQuorum Global Summit is a gathering for investors, blockchain developers, leaders and visionaries that are interested in Tezos. 

![TQuorum Global Summit NY](/files/qy/qyjtdmfe.1_NIngHg0_-iSffVBUK1nPBg.jpeg)

## Blockchain for innovators

[Tezos](https://tezos.com/) is a blockchain platform that is host to both assets and smart-contracts. 

One of the main features of the platform is its [formal upgrade mechanism](https://medium.com/tezos/amending-tezos-b77949d97e1e), where participants can take part in upgrading the blockchain. (You can explore the details of voting process on [Agora](https://www.tezosagora.org/))

This enables the blockchain to implement new innovations through a formal process that  eschews hard forks and other disruptive actions. 


## Is Haskell the future of Tezos? 

Our main focus at Tezos right now is on [Morley](https://gitlab.com/morley-framework/morley), a set of developer tools for writing smart contracts, and its accompanying set of Haskell eDSLs – Indigo and Lorentz. 

Work at these projects gave us a lot of insight on how Haskell can help Tezos, and we wanted to share our findings with the wider community. Fortunately, TQuorum Global Summit was a great opportunity for that. 

At the conference, Serokell’s COO Fedor Fedorov presented a vision of future of Tezos that integrates [OCaml ](https://ocaml.org/)and [Haskell](https://www.haskell.org/).  

![Fedor presenting about the future of Tezos](/files/fd/fdqov6x1.20191001_131456.jpg)

You can watch the entire speech on the [TQ Tezos YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSLdBOQxYic&t=4s). 



##  Smart contracts, SNARKs, and blockchain sharks

But our presentation wasn’t the only spotlight of the event. Whatever your interests, TQ Global Summit had you covered (as long as you were interested in Tezos and blockchain).

The topics of the conference ranged from highly technical presentations focused on latest Tezos apps like [Checker](https://checker.is/) and subjects like zero-knowledge proofs to more abstract discussions about blockchain and future of proof-of-stake protocols. 

We got to experience everything, and, hopefully, take home at least a part of it. For more info on participants and their presentations, you can check out the [event recap](https://medium.com/tqtezos/tquorum-global-summit-recap-dfc23a74099a) created by TQ Tezos.

### Hi everyone! 

Let us tell you what happened at **FPure Conference in Kazan**.

The main event list of speakers was amazing – actually, it was expected from the only functional programming conference in Russia.

Alexander Granin, lead of the Novosibirsk LambdaNsk community, talked about two different approaches in functional programming – Final Tagless and Free Monad. [Vitaliy Bragilevsky ](http://https://twitter.com/_bravit) from SFEDU made a short lecture about building a compiler, and Alexey Pirogov from Hexlet talked about functional design and FP patterns.

What about us? Our haskellers [Danya](http://https://twitter.com/CartesianClosed) and Rinat performed excellently (congratulations once again!) It was a great opportunity for guys to represent their work and shake some hands, of course.

Our engineers gave a talk about approaches and problems of the type-driven development in Numeric Haskell. The visitors were posting their impressions online on Twitter. We selected some of the tweets to share with you.

https://twitter.com/_bravit/status/1132201805797052416
“They’re telling programmers about Presburger arithmetic. This is useful!”

https://twitter.com/xufocoder/status/1132202918923440128
“It seems that I’m starting to understand what is happening here. The dimension of the matrices cannot be controlled with the types that guys use when they solve their ML tasks. This problem can be solved using dependent types, but Haskell doesn’t have this feature! What to do? Emulate.”

https://twitter.com/xufocoder/status/1132206956788297728
“If your code is simple and the algorithm is not COMPLICATED, you may skip messing around with dependent types in your Haskell programme. But if you need to deal with it, remember that you will have to make efforts to prove your code is correct to the compiler at least.”

Meanwhile, Danya and Rinat are writing the next chapters of their series “Dimensions and Haskell”. 
“The second and third parts of the article series are going to be the most intense. In the blog post, we’re going to depict how we solved the issues and where our approach came from. After that, we will show various examples and explain how the approach is useful.

A couple of words about our approach. It can be applied not only to dimensions but to any parameters. It can be designed as a library which is compatible with any of matrix libraries and allows separating an algorithm from the proof of its correctness. But no more spoilers! Just believe me, it’s going to be hot.” 
– Danya Rogozin

The second part of the series is coming soon, stay tuned!

Serokell leverages functional programming to create bespoke solutions for a wide range of industries, including [biotech software](https://serokell.io/biotech-software-development), fintech and edtech platforms, and more. Contact us to discuss your idea!

Serokell at FPure 2019

How to Win at Web Summit

How to survive and accomplish your goals in large conferences like Web Summit? Roman Alterman gives 6 tips from his experience at Web Summit 2019 and a multitude of other conferences.

_Web Summit is huge. According to official statistics, in 2019 it was attended by 70 469 people. It is an experience of its own kind._

_I’ll describe. Just after entering the first out of five pavilions you are shocked by the multitude of booths and visitors—you look from side to side and think what the strategy should be: should you visit enormous booths of IT-giants like Microsoft or SAP or is it better to start by covering tons of startups all around the area? At the end of the article, I hope you’ll know what to do._
## 6 tips to succeed at your next Web Summit

On November 2-5, the CEO, COO and CBDO of Serokell visited [Web Summit 2019](https://websummit.com/). The event was full of smart people, bright ideas and brilliant innovations. For us as a team, it was a wonderful experience and I would love to share my thoughts about it in a way that’s helpful for first time visitors. 
 
Therefore, I will list a couple of points which can be useful if you are considering taking part in Web Summit or a large global tech conference like it. Let’s go!  


### 1. Know your goal

Before coming to the conference you should spend enough time on preparation to feel confident during the event. 

![Can you feel the confidence?](/files/80/806nfh2x.20191107_175159.jpg)

Remember, everything is possible here. Before coming, you should formulate your precise goal for this week and work in its direction. There are many opportunities: getting new clients, raising funds, searching for outsourcing services, headhunting and testing your hypotheses about the market and its participants.  You could spend all week just working on one thing from this list, and if you are well prepared, the probability of achieving your initial goal becomes very high. 

### 2. Know who participates

The important thing to mention is that Web Summit is more for CEOs and business development executives. As a result, don't count on a high level of technical talks there—it's more about business.

![A look inside Web Summit 2019](/files/au/aukiaf05.20191105_173512.jpg)

Regarding the booths, there are several types of them. Startups have the smallest ones and you can find a huge amount of them in each pavilion according to their industry: FinTech, HealthCare, Social, Security and lots of other fields are amongst the options. 

Besides startups, there are bigger booths for sustainable businesses like JetBrains and different infrastructures like accelerators, hiring aggregators, VCs and even countries. Huge zones are for industry giants like Booking.com, Lenovo, Amazon, Siemens, Porsche, SAP, and dozens of other market leaders. If you are attending for business purposes, there is probably no point to spend much time near the biggest booths. Representatives there usually don’t have the power to make any decisions, they just present their products.  

A very important thing: booths are only the tip of the WebSummit iceberg, thousands of interesting people and projects come in as attendees. The best way to reach them out is through preliminary search and the event-specific app.

### 3. Schedule in advance


Therefore, you should schedule meetings and find interesting opportunities in advance.  
 
Go through the endless list of participants on the Summit website, get in touch with proper ones and arrange a cup of coffee before coming to Lisbon. That way, you will be able to spend all 3 days efficiently.

### 4. Use the Web Summit app

Don’t underestimate the application, it is an instrument that brings you a lot of opportunities. It is key to becoming a part of a huge social network. It’s simple.  
 
1. Fill in your profile and become visible to other participants. 

2. After that, find any person who is interesting to you, propose him a meeting and schedule it right inside the application using the internal calendar.

What is more, you can form your own schedule by choosing interesting speeches and presentations and combining them with your meetings. The application will always notify you about the upcoming activity linking it with the Summit map. You can even use it before and after the event to get in touch with anyone you did not have time to catch in Lisbon or just stay connected to a big base of potential partners.

![Form your own schedule by combining both speeches and business meetings](/files/kk/kk9jijxs.20191106_163318.jpg)

All participants have a [QR code](https://www.adobe.com/express/feature/image/qr-code-generator) on their badge. After talking to anybody, just scan his QR with an app and send him a “Hi!”— that would help you to keep in touch. Probably, this is the first event that is free of business cards. Forget about carrying kilos of carton and remembering who’s card it actually is: just scan the badge and continue the negotiations in the application chat.

### 5. Feel the rhythm of the Night Summit 

After a day in the fields, Night Summit begins. Every evening all participants go to the best party locations. Streets are closed, with access only for people with WS badges. It’s an enormous networking event under the dark sky and an awesome opportunity to build business relations informally. We have to admit that it is not so easy—the amount of people is very large, and as a result, everybody is grouping and finding a lead becomes quite tough. To succeed, you need to be a networking shark. 
 
Besides the official Night Summit, there are lots of side events sponsored by different companies and projects. In our opinion, most of them are not worth visiting—descriptions are brilliant, locations are interesting, but, frankly speaking, it is very hard to compete with the official one. Visiting a side event could be efficient only if you have a specific interest in it. If not, we believe that spending time at Night Summit is much more reasonable. 


### 6. Be prepared for the crowd

The only negative thing I can mention is also the best one: the number of visitors. 

![Visitors at the event](/files/o4/o4j2scdc.20191106_124824.jpg)

Be ready to spend a lot of time in lines of differing shape and size: to enter the location, drop off your bag, get a meal or get inside the stage zone. However, there are a few life hacks which can make life easier.  
 
* Don’t forget to go through the registration at the airport just after landing in Lisbon. There is a huge tent with volunteers which can help you out with that. Registering directly at Summit could become a disaster—on the first day you may spend an hour or more in the line.

* Use the “Fast Track” application for choosing and paying for your meal and just pick up your order in a specified place. 

* Come earlier or later than 10-10:30 AM or lose your priceless time waiting in line at the entrance.

## Conclusion

Web Summit is not a regular IT conference. It’s a huge celebration. It’s a time of gathering for the IT world. Everything is possible here. It’s an awesome opportunity to open your mind, find out how different countries and cultures have their own individual ideas, approaches and views. It’s a good opportunity to invest or find investments, a perfect way to build up your international network. 

Keep in mind that this time can be spent efficiently only in synergy with good preparation and sufficient experience. If you are counting on this event as an instrument for business development, don’t choose it as your first conference—train on smaller ones. Literally, train,  because all the other events seem to be just training once you get to Web Summit.