The Bay Area Lisp and Scheme Users Group meets a few times every year to discuss computer science, design, human-computer interaction, complex systems development, programming languages, compiler optimization, cryptography, computer music, artificial intelligence, and other topics from a Lisp and Scheme point of view. I'm a member and co-organizer of the group.
Our meetings are typically organized around one long-form talk and a few five-minute lightning talks, followed by snacks and chatting. I've learned a lot about many interesting projects by attending.
I've been video-recording many of the talks and putting them on YouTube. To date, we have thirty-two talks on our playlist, including these long-form talks:
- The Lambda Calculus for Fun and Factorials, by Ron Garret (Oct 2015)
- Semantic Graph Databases at Franz, by Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz, Inc. (Nov 2015)
- Escape from the Heap: Low-Level Programming in Common Lisp, by Ahmon Dancy, software engineer at Franz, Inc. (Nov 2015)
- An unusual compiler for (pure, lexical) Lisp, by Ścisław Dercz of Fido Labs (Jan 2016)
- The 3L Project and Our Computing Future, by Thomas Hintz (Jan 2016)
- Elliptic Curve Cryptography, A very brief and superficial introduction, by Ron Garret (May 2016)
- Tricks of an Efficient Embedded Lisp Interpreter, by Jonas Karlsson (Mar 2017)
- Roger Corman, author of Corman Common Lisp (Jul 2017)
- Lisp at the Frontier of Computation, by Robert Smith of Rigetti Computing (Dec 2017)
- MakerLisp Machine: an eZ80 CPU card running bare-metal Lisp, by Luther Johnson (Feb 2019)
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, please join us for our next meeting. We're a friendly group, and we'd love to meet you and hear about your Lisp and Scheme projects, too. And if you'd like to give a talk, please send me a note.
(By the way, I've automated much of the video post-production work in Scheme. I wrote a wrapper around FFmpeg that takes much of the complexity out of using it. I plan to write about that in a future blog post.)