Kraklisp and hackerspace in Kraków

Tagged as journey, kraków, lisp, hackerspace

Written on 2016-05-03 by Daniel "jackdaniel" Kochmański

During the last weekend I've been in Kraków to visit some friends. Since I know that there is a lisp group kraklisp on the Jagiellonian University and I know a few people in there (mainly from IRC channel #lisp-pl @ freenode), I've arrived in Kraków a bit earlier than I have originally planned to give a talk about the reader macros in Common Lisp. You may find it here (it's in polish):

Michał "phoe" Herda has met us on the bus station near the university buildings and lead us to the destination. Jagiellonian University has very beautiful buildings reminding these on Morasko in Poznań. When we've arrived at the destination we have entered KSI students association room, waited a few moments and started the workshops.

I was surprised that so many people arrived. Eleven people is a lot given that Common Lisp is considered a niche language. kraklisp brings together not only students but also lisp enthusiasts who work with Scala, Java, NetBSD and many other technologies outside the university. That's great to know, that we have an active group of lisp hackers here in Poland!

My talk took about an hour and from the feedback I infer it was just fine but the pace was a little too fast. People were actively listening and asking questions. That was fun. After me Jacek "TeMPOraL" Złydach lead a workshop about the web scrapping in Common Lisp. He has shown very nicely how to build programs interactively in the bottom-up manner. The video is available here (also in polish):

After the meeting the group has split and we have headed to the Hackerspace Kraków headquarters. Amazing place – group of people who tinker with the hardware and software in their free time. A lot of electronic devices, soldering irons, computers and boxes with an unknown content. We've chatted a little and we've learned about some nice projects they have developed – like a device mounted on your chest to locate objects in front of you. It has been created to help blind people to get around the room. Theirs location was in a little bustle, because they are currently moving to the new location. Hackerspace in Kraków is definitely worth seeing, and if feasible – cooperating with.

Finally we've moved to our stay due to the late hour (hackerspace is open 24h!). Kraków seems to be a great place to engage in a CS hobbies like programming and electronics or just to hang around with a smart people in general. I'm glad I'll arrive there again soon to attend the European Lisp Symposium.