JuliaCon workshops

[dmm]

JuliaCon this year is 8 days of workshops (July 20-27), following by 3 days of the main conference (July 28-30).

The list of workshops is here: juliacon.org/2021/workshops/

The most interesting for me is the workshop on the next generation of autodiff systems (July 27), "Diffractor: Next-Gen AD for Julia": pretalx.com/juliacon2021/talk/review/MJ7T9LXLXNDWHPW9WJN7SGTWU7L9QMJW

All workshops start at 10am United States East Coast time and last 3 hours, two parallel workshops each day; if you don't care about interactive real-time aspects, youtube recordings will be available...

Full schedule (UTC time default, can switch to US East Coast): pretalx.com/juliacon2021/schedule/

Comments

[dmm]

Other than that:

1) "GPU programming in Julia" is quite useful, if you want to do GPU programming in Julia. Don't listen to it in advance, but if you are about to start writing software for GPUs, this is a great workshop and will save you tons of time explaining what to do and what to avoid.

2) "Package development in VSCode". You probably want to first master Visual Studio Code and its Julia extension on your own a bit (the introductory part of this workshop is way too fast and abbreviated, it pretends to be self-contained in this sense, but it is not). Once you've done that, it is a tremendously useful workshop, teaches all kinds of tips and tricks for Julia programming inside Visual Studio Code.

Note that GitHub Copilot also works nicely for Julia, not just for Python, although the Copilot is a closed beta at the moment. But it will not remain a closed beta forever, and this is a good enough reason on its own to master Visual Studio Code.

3) "Simulating Big Models in Julia with ModelingToolkit" - very useful tutorial and overview of the state of symbolic computations in Julia, and of multiple orders of magnitudes speed-ups enjoyed by its users, and it was conducted by the brilliant Chris Rackauckas, although it was just a reasonably good workshop (much less impressive than his SciML workshop last year: "The best talk of JuliaCon 2020 was this 4-hour workshop: "Doing Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) With Julia" by Chris Rackauckas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwVO0Xh2Hbg ")

4) "JuliaReach" - an interesting material, but the presentation was so-so.

5) "Intro to Metaprogramming" - I am sure this will be super-useful for anyone who wants to master Lisp macros and such, but that's still tomorrow, so I am looking forward to it, since my level of mastery of these things is rudimentary and needs improvement.