The Haskell Foundation is proud to announce the inaugural AmeriHac, a two day haskell hackathon, with this iteration being in New York City! Jane Street has kindly offered to host the Haskell Foundation’s first North American Haskell event.
The event will take place on Feb 7th and Feb 8th 2026 within Jane Street’s New York premises. Registration will be free, thanks to Jane Street’s generosity as hosts.
Organization
Much like ZuriHac, there will be dedicated space for specific projects (GHC, cabal, stack, etc.), with the full details being determined by registrant interest.
The webpage will be updated with more information as we finalize keynote speakers and the schedule.
This event is not meant to exclude people outside the US. It’s worth noting that many people not in the US have already registered.
I understand that some folks are anxious about traveling to the US. This was something we thought about a lot.
Our current thinking has the following three pillars:
The US is home to a significant number of Haskell developers, and crossing oceans can be expensive.
There are many people in the US that for various reasons have difficulty leaving the US, we think that they deserve the chance to attend an event like this too.
It doesn’t always have to be in the US. The US, Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean are all on the table for future iterations. Finding friendly venues is the trickiest bit, but we’re very open to moving it around.
And that’s all fair. My comment was indeed aimed at the sentiment I quoted.
I have a standing invitation to visit the US. It’s in the DC/Langley area. I’m not going.
Of course ‘the current climate’ is the culmination of a process that has been going on for a long time, so I don’t expect it to get better anytime soon.
As someone who hasn’t been to a ZuriHac, what is the hackathon part like? Is there structure for pairing enthusiastic but not-picky hackers with projects, or is it a socially fluid you-have-to-know-people situation, or do most people come in with a thing to do already and it’s just kind of a big coworking space? Are the projects more like exercises for beginners or like products intended for the wider community to use eventually? I’ve tried searching online but text-based summaries of ZuriHac seem to focus on the talks and not the hacking.
There are project pitches at the conference opening and there are discord / slack channels for each of them, which make it easy to join, but there is no compulsory random assignment or similar. The precise dynamics depends on the ratio between the number of participants and the number of projects, which is hard to guess before an inaugural edition.
There will be a keynote speaker each day, but we are still deciding whether there will be other talks throughout the day. The venue space might make it difficult to have talks that wouldn’t disrupt the folks that want to focus on the hacking.
Does the question imply that you’d want to give a talk/keynote?
For people that are eligible for ESTA, but don’t already have one: note that the fee will rise. So you can save $19 by getting your ESTA before Sept 30th. https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/
Is there a timeline to confirm attendance or when a seat is guaranteed? I live in Argentina. Traveling to US requires some arrangements. What happens after someone completes the google form? How many/% seats are still available?
We want to confirm registrations about a month out (i.e. early Jan).
My recommendation: register and just keep in touch with me (jmct@haskell.foundation). If we have to ‘unregister’ you, that’s not a huge deal.
EDIT: I’ve been told that I may have misunderstood your question, @bcardiff, so I’ll rephrase what I’m trying to say:
If you register now, you have a seat, we’re about half full at the moment, so still plenty of space. What I meant about confirming in early Jan is that we recognize that some folks won’t be able to attend, even though they’ve registered. So we will confirm with everyone that they still plan to attend. If they don’t, we will ‘open up’ those slots to others.
If you need any sort of confirmation about the event in order to get a visa or something like that, just reach out to me and I can arrange that for you relatively quickly (a few days at most).
It’s been added to the website, but in case you were waiting for it here: The first keynote speaker has been confirmed, Ryan Scott! Ryan’s a long-time contributor to GHC and is currently a Research Engineer at Galois, where he works on all sorts of cool security/privacy/program analysis projects.
Title: Developing Tools for Formal Specification and Verification
Abstract:
Galois maintains and develops a broad suite of formal methods tools, which can specify the behavior of code, symbolically execute code in several imperative programming languages, formally verify that the behavior of code matches a spec, and more. A significant number of these tools are written in Haskell, including Cryptol, Crux, and SAW. I will describe the ecosystem of Haskell-based formal methods tools that Galois develops, lessons that we have learned in using varying styles of Haskell in different projects, and what challenges we have faced in using Haskell at this scale.
can you confirm if seats are left at this point? I can make it if I book plane tickets in advance, closer to January, the plane ticket to nyc will have doubled or tripled then, I wouldn’t be able to afford the trip.
.
It’s a bit too early to tell.