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

Monad

Serokell came in 158th place in the Open AI Codex competition. Learn more about the competition in this article.

Serokell Data Science Team Takes Part in Open AI Codex Challenge

OpenAI Codex is an artificial intelligence system released less than a week ago that generates code based on user requests. On August 12th OpenAI hosted a challenge that allowed anyone to test Codex’s capacities.

Our Data Science team members Dmitry Puzirev and Alexey Khachiyants took part in the competition and came 158th out of a couple of thousands of participants. They had to crack five simple tasks with a twist: using OpenAI Codex as their coding assistant. 

<center>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The Codex Challenge is now closed. Congratulations to the 842 challengers who solved all 5 puzzles! Codex is taking a break after assisting with 23,439 completions.</p>&mdash; OpenAI (@OpenAI) <a href="https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1425995602236637189?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 13, 2021</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</center>

‘The platform was lagging at first because there were so many participants’, says Dmitry Puzyrev, Junior Data Science engineer at Serokell. ‘But we still managed to complete the tasks and reach top 160. It was a fun experience’.

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.

Introduction to GUI Programming in Haskell

Learn how to do GUI programming in Haskell with GTK+.

**Update:** You can watch the full talk on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1aq8ikO-8Q&t=2s).

Join us on 1st October, 17.00 UTC to learn more about GUI programming in Haskell. 

Our software engineer Vladislav Zavialov will give a talk on how to use Haskell and GTK+ to build graphical user interfaces in a functional programming language. He will talk about topics such as:

*   Initializing the build environment with Nix.
*   Creating an app using GTK+ widgets. 
*   Offloading work to other threads, using `GLib.idleAdd`. 
*   Documentation and resources to study if you want to build an app of your own.

This is a great way to get started with GUI development in Haskell and find answers to any questions you have. 

To watch the talk, [join us](http://meet.google.com/fui-diin-uxk) on 1st October, 17.00 UTC. 

<center>
	<i>Think you'll forget? Add the event to your Google Calendar.</i>
<a target="_blank" href="https://calendar.google.com/event?action=TEMPLATE&amp;tmeid=NWltOWp2dWNiZnQzM2RybjR1aHJyamNlcjYgY18ya2Y1M2U5OTdxNjJmdWl0N2xza2hjaG4yc0Bn&amp;tmsrc=c_2kf53e997q62fuit7lskhchn2s%40group.calendar.google.com"><img border="0" src="/files/xm/xmvysj0o.gc_button1_en.gif" alt="Link to Google calendar"></a>
</center>

![talk picture](/files/2g/2glb7e7k.Vladislav-Zavialov-.jpg)

By the way, if you haven’t yet seen our previous talk by Maxim Koltsov, we highly suggest checking it out. In it, Maxim goes over how evaluation and GC in Haskell work, going deep in the compilation pipeline of Haskell, showing some interesting details of intermediate languages that GHC uses, and giving tips to optimize GC in Haskell. 

<iframe width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" data-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vvLDerKtUWE"></iframe>

Serokell Academy: Session 1

Join us on 17th and 18th February to learn about various topics like product development, personal security, metamathematics, and Elixir.

Join us on 17th and 18th February to learn about various topics like product development, personal security, metamathematics, and Elixir. 

During the course of the two days, we will host 4 talks and discussions, featuring Serokell members and an awesome guest. Everyone is invited to come, hang out, ask questions, and learn. 

Let’s dive into the details of each event. 


## Personal Information Security 

![Kirill Kuvshinov](/files/xr/xr7up57i.kuvshinov.jpg)

In his talk, Kirill Kuvshinov will teach you how to protect your personal data, accounts, and devices properly: what risks are there, how paranoid you should be, and what countermeasures you can take to stay safe. You will learn how people hack people, what passwords are good and bad, how your phone can let your down, and who is that man in the middle – all with examples of high-profile hacks that have targeted large companies.

**Time:** February 17, 15:00 UTC 

[Watch live on Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/serokell_green).

## Product Development Basics 

![Ivan Gromakovskii](/files/tu/tuayr0jw.gromak.jpg)



Ivan Gromakovskii is one of our most experienced team leads. He will talk about basic product management concepts that we use at Serokell and show how we start the development of a new product with a toy product as an example. You will learn about important topics that are often forgotten at the initial stages of development but which have a high impact on the overall product success. 

**More from Ivan:** [How to Be a Team Lead in 2020](https://serokell.io/blog/how-developers-master-skills)

**Time:** February 17, 17:00 UTC

[Watch live on Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/serokell_green).



## Philosophy X Metamathematics 

![Daniel Rogozin](/files/4a/4a06pm7j.rogozin_(1).jpg)




Danya Rogozin is our premier logician and also can be frequently seen working on new Haskell features in GHC. In his talk on metamathematics, he will lead you on a sweeping journey across centuries, touching on important mathematical milestones like Cantor’s theorem and Continuum Hypothesis, Principia Mathematica,  Hilbert’s program, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and covering them in his trademark illustration style. 

**More from Danya:** [Incomplete and Utter Introduction to Modal Logic ](https://serokell.io/blog/incomplete-and-utter-introduction-to-modal-logic)

**Time:** February 18, 15:00 UTC

[Watch live on Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/serokell_green).



## Elixir in 2021

![Saša & Jonn](/files/08/08ci11an.sasha-john_(1).jpg)


In this discussion, we will have two participants: Saša Jurić, the author of [Elixir in Action](https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action), and Jonn Mostovoy, the CAO and co-founder of Serokell. The discussion will cover the present and the future of Elixir, touching on things like what is Elixir good for, the current state of the language, and exciting future possibilities. 

**More from Saša:** [The Soul of Erlang and Elixir](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE)

**More from Jonn:** [History of Erlang and Elixir](https://serokell.io/blog/history-of-erlang-and-elixir)

**Time:** February 18, 18:00 UTC

[Watch live on Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/serokell_green).

<hr>

To sum it all up, here's the full timetable:

![Serokell Academy participants](/files/04/04gwp98c.participants-3.jpg)

Ask your friends, invite your colleagues, book the time in your calendars – it's going to be fun and we hope to see you all there. 👋