Hello
I’m a seasoned Systems Administrator and Developer with over 20 years of experience in infrastructure and software, and I’m now making a deliberate pivot toward Haskell development.
About three years ago, I completed courses in Haskell and Plutus. While I grasped the fundamentals, I haven’t used Haskell actively since, so I’m now focused on retaking and deepening my practical skills through real contributions.
I’m looking to join an active open source / GPL project where I can start adding value immediately while rebuilding and expanding my Haskell fluency. Given my background, I can help not only with code but also with:
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Improving documentation (guides, examples, API docs)
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Small features
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Setting up or improving CI/CD workflows
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Learning and contributing to testing in Haskell
My goal is clear: to transition into a professional Haskell developer role. I want to use serious open-source contributions as my hands-on training ground and proof of skill.
Areas of interest: FinTech / Blockchain (Plutus included), Search & Data Processing, Backend Systems, Developer Tooling, Infrastructure/DevOps in Haskell.
If you maintain or contribute to a project that could benefit from a disciplined contributor who understands real-world development workflows—and who’s ready to start with foundational work—I’d be very keen to collaborate and grow with your community.
I’m ready to start.
Leonardo Bauchwitz
PS / Availability note: I can dedicate a set number of hours each week (e.g., 5-10 hours) to contribute consistently. I’m looking for a project where this level of commitment can be valuable.
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If you maintain or contribute to a project that could benefit from a disciplined contributor who understands real-world development workflows—and who’s ready to start with foundational work—I’d be very keen to collaborate and grow with your community.
Dear Leonardo,
That sounds like a fantastic offer, thank you! It’d be great if yoiu felt able to contribute to the GHC project, where we sorely need expertise and attention on CI, testing, documentation, and numerous small tasks.
For example, see the discusison here: Poor contribution experience (#26728) · Issues · Glasgow Haskell Compiler / GHC · GitLab, which is all about reducing friction for new contributors. As a new contributor, you’d be perfectly placed to know where the friction was!
Please join the GHC team (section 2) and come to the next weekly meeting on Tuesday if you can.
If you get stuck, ping me.
Thanks again!
Simon
7 Likes
You might want to get involved in DataHaskell. It’s a movement to add data science libraries and good functionality for data processing in general, which might give you experience.
Welcome!
i’d love to invite you (or anyone else inclined) to take a look at runix, a library built on top of polysemy to build composable programs with managed capabilities (at compile time).
For example: you define for a specific function that it can read a specific filesystem and access a specific REST api, and you can be sure it’s not overstepping it’s bounds.
sendfiles :: (Member (FileSystem project) r, Member (RestAPI MyService) r) → Sem r ()
this would just not compile if you tried to do anything more than is provided by those effects.
Currently it’s used by runix-code (a claude-code style coding agent) to run agents and call tools in a safer way than other similar agents (at least: more defined what it can and can’t do), but this could also have quite a bit of potential when it comes to regulated industries (fintech/healthcare) since it’s one of the few programming problems i’ve found where using anything except haskell cannot provide reasonable assurances that you’re not just bypassing controlled access paths or audit logs (most languages just let you do IO from just about anywhere). The project is still quite young and unpolished, but it’s starting to come together. It is still at a state where major architectural changes are possible/welcome.
it also comes with a llm library for interfacing with LLM apis, which each have their own quirks and oddities, so that comes with a comprehensive test infrastructure to run actual queries against them to check which features in particular they support and how various workarounds have to be applied.
i come from a similar background as you (mostly system administration, general programming) and this is my first serious attempt of getting something larger build in haskell, and so far it’s been quite a joy. So if you’re looking for something low-stakes that’s still open for some actual exploration and experimentation, but also more than just an concept and a dream, this might be something that could interest you.
Thank you so much for this generous invitation and for pointing me to a concrete starting point. Contributing to a project as foundational as GHC is a compelling prospect, especially with the focus on improving the contributor experience—something I can certainly relate to coming in as a newcomer.
I will definitely join the GHC team as suggested and make an effort to attend an upcoming meeting to listen and learn. I need a short time to properly review the project’s landscape and the specific issue you mentioned to understand where I could be most useful, given my current focus on build and rebuilding my Haskell fluency.
I truly appreciate the welcome and will be in touch once I’ve done my homework.
Best regards
Leonardo
3 Likes
Thank you for such a detailed and welcoming reply!
Your project sounds fascinating—the intersection of effect systems, capability security, and practical tooling touch a lot of boxes for me. I see a lot of potential applications in regulated industries.
It’s also encouraging to hear you come from a similar sysadmin/dev background. I’ll definitely take a close look at the runix repository in the coming days to understand the architecture and the codebase. I want to see where my initial efforts could be most productive, whether it’s in documentation, testing, or small foundational tasks.
This looks like a very promising space to dive into. I’ll explore the repo and likely come back with a few questions.
Best,
Leonardo
1 Like
Thank you for pointing me to DataHaskell! The vision outlined on the website—building a complete data science ecosystem in Haskell with pillars like dataframes, Hasktorch, and distributed computing resonates with me.
My interest is particularly strong because I see a natural alignment with bioinformatics and computational biology, a field built on complex data transformation pipelines. Last year, I completed a dedicated training program (BioNT Training) focused on bioinformatics, RNA-seq analysis, high-performance computing, and data management. This experience showed me both the power and the pain points of current workflows.
I’m very keen to explore whether DataHaskell has, or is contemplating, any initiatives or sub-projects applied to life sciences data. The promise of Haskell’s strong typing and pure functional pipelines for ensuring reproducibility and correctness in biological data analysis is incredibly compelling.
I’ll spend the coming days exploring the website https://www.datahaskell.org/ to understand the current development focus.
If there’s a working group or discussion channel where applications in bioinformatics are being considered, I’d be grateful to be pointed in that direction.
Regards
Leonardo
2 Likes
The canonical place to discuss dataHaskell related things is the discord server. Don’t hesitate to join and chat!
Hi Leonardo,
The Bluefin effect system has a list of ongoing tasks that people can contribute to. The ones suitable for newcomers are
- Implement benchmarks
benchmarks
- See if it builds under MicroHS
- Add inspection testing to ensure that Bluefin effectful operations get rewritten to the equivalent
IO code
There is also an ongoing need to
If you like benchmarking/performance engineering then you might like the first. If you’re interested in new compilers then you might like the second. If you like code generation internals you might like the third. If you like investigating different ways of structuring code with effect systems you might like the fourth.
If you’re curious about any of these, or any other possibilities of contributing to Bluefin, please comment on the tasks meta issue.
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Hi! Also, if you are interested in tooling, have a look at the Haskell Language Server, there are many issues labeled level:easy:
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Hello Tom,
Thank you for the detailed list of tasks and for the invitation to contribute to Bluefin. I’m currently reviewing the project documentation to better understand it.
As you might imagine, my current understanding of effect systems is still basic, and I need some time to absorb the core concepts of Bluefin. The tasks you mentioned (benchmarks, inspection testing, examples) seem very valuable, but they require a level of familiarity with the codebase that I feel I don’t yet have. That said, I will continue examining the project this week
Best regards,
1 Like
Thanks for the response Leonardo. I added some basic details about what’s needed to contribute to benchmarks here: Bluefin benchmarks · Issue #87 · tomjaguarpaw/bluefin · GitHub. Let me know if that helps, or if you’d like more details. You’re welcome to message me on that ticket.
By the way, if you’re interested in capabilities, one way of seeing Bluefin is as a capability system. All effect systems are capability systems, in some sense, but Bluefin is unique amongst Haskell effect systems in that the effects are passed by value level capabilities (Bluefin calls them “handles”).