2019 Election Campaign: Tomasz Heimowski

Who am I?

I’m a professional developer whose main areas of interest are F# and Functional Programming in general.
As a Senior Software Developer at Datto I apply F# to tackle problems from various areas.
In my free time, apart from contributing to OSS projects and learning new tech stuff, I enjoy lifting weights as well as dancing.

Why am I running?

I believe that Functional Programming is still being underestimated in software industry and that specially applies to F#. My mission is to promote the language as a general-purpose tool for commercial solutions.

Why vote for me?

I plan to achieve my goal with a practical approach, i.e. promote the language with learning resources, deploy serious F# systems for my own employers, as well as help other big players on the market to use F#.
Also, as a member and advocate of SAFE Stack I’d like to see growing adoption for F# as a “full stack” language.

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I have 2 questions I’m going to ask each Board candidate to begin - but first, a little background:

Historically, the programs managed by the F# Software Foundation have been managed and operated by a Board member. While it’s great to see Board members be actively involved and hands-on (something I highly encourage!), the downside to this is that sustainability of programs has suffered at times. For example, the Diversity Program has been very quiet over the last year, as none of the current Board members have “stepped up” into that role and taken it over since the previous member decided not to run in 2018. We run the risk of this again this year - Gien, who has been the core enabler of the Mentorship Program, has decided not to run for the Board this year, which will leave that program in limbo until somebody is setup to run it or a new approach is devised.

  1. Are there any programs, either existing or new that’d you’d like to see formed, where you would like to take an active role in helping coordinate or enable?
  2. Given the sustainability concern mentioned above, do you have any ideas for ways to try to keep more consistency in programs moving forward, particularly as Board members come and go?

My take on this is somewhat similar to what other candidates already stated.
I think the organisation should focus on the programs that exist now and make them as strong and reliable as possible.
Regarding the sustainability, it makes sense to involve community members into the programs so that board members have a sole coordination role.

That said, if the board gets capable of running already present programs highly efficient, I’d love to see a new program which helps big industry players in F# adoption.
I believe one of the primary issues in introducing F# to tech companies is a lack of “official” support channel.
F# Software Foundation could become the go-to organisation when a firm is looking for help.

Hi Tomasz!
Can I ask you to elaborate on the official support channel idea? If I understand this correctly, the idea is to reassure larger companies (which tend to not like risk too much), so if they have an issue, they know where to find help. How would you see that look like, practically? And what, in your opinion, are the problems these companies might be worried about?

Hi Mathias!

Yes that pretty much sums up this idea: companies know where to look for F# help.
To achieve that, F# Software Foundation would need to start active campaign in advertising that it’s ready for accepting queries from business. Up to a point where it would become a well known fact among developers:

“You’re having this issue with F#, did you try contacting F# Software Foundation?”

Also if necessary the foundation could provide speakers for in-house talks / workshops for a given corporation.

The issues that companies have right now with F# are probably very diverse, however I had personally encountered cases where there was a push back on F#, because tooling wasn’t working as expected or people would stumble upon edge cases (compiler, syntax, tooling) which were not well documented, and only someone with prior F# experience could help.