Hi everyone,

This week Facebook are visiting and telling us how about the type system of their new language Hack, which they have been using to replace their old PHP codebase. RSVP here. We'll also have our Oxmas Geek Night, which will be the last one this term.

In week 8, we have the Michaelmas TGM. Come for the cheese and wine and stay for the minor constitutional amendments and committee reports.

Elsewhere in Oxford, Jane Street are running an estimathon for aspiring data scientists (there will be prizes!) and Facebook are hosting a talk for those interested in internships with their product analytics team.

Have a great week!

Edward and the rest of the committee

P.S. There's a still a week left to get cheap CompSoc stash.

Events

Geek Night 6: LAN Night

19:00 Saturday 6th Week - Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science

Join us for an evening of video games and pizza! You'll need to bring your own laptop, but we'll provide everything else. We aren't planning to play any particular games in advance - so it will just be whatever people fancy.

Facebook tech talk: The Hack programming language: Types for PHP

19:00 Wednesday 7th Week - Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science

Facebook’s main website, ads platform, and much of its internal tooling is implemented in PHP, a language not known for elegance or best practice in programming language design. Over the last five years Facebook has embarked on an ambitious project to migrate its code base to Hack, which takes the syntax of PHP, removes the worst features, and adds static typing and modern constructs for asynchronous programming and typed UI components. In this talk I will focus on Hack’s type system, which combines OCaml-like type inference, object-oriented generics in the style of C# or Java, and flow-based typing of local variables.

Andrew Kennedy is a software engineer at Facebook London working on the Hack team. Before joining Facebook in 2016 he spent 16 years at Microsoft Research, during which time he helped design and implement the generics feature for the .NET Common Language Runtime and polymorphic units-of-measure inference for the F# programming language, in addition to making many research contributions in type systems, semantics, formal verification and compilation.

RSVP here.

Geek Night 7: Oxmas

19:00 Saturday 7th Week - Undergraduate Social Area, Department of Computer Science

Bring your laptop for some Christmas themed programming (and food!) to celebrate the final (official) Geek Night of the year.

Michaelmas TGM and Cheese & Wine Evening

19:00 Wednesday 7th Week - Lecture Theatre A, Department of Computer Science

The first half of the evening will be for the TGM, the agenda for which is attached. The constitutional changes proposed are the adoption of the Proctor's new standard constitution, code of conduct and complaint procedure, and clarifications of the CompSoc by-laws. There will be reports from the President, Secretary and Treasurer.

After (or maybe during), will be copious amounts of cheese and wine. We will have a fine range of cheese from across Europe, a variety of red wines and a few exciting new compotes. There will still be pizza, but it will much less civilised.

Sponsor notices

Jane Street estimathon

What's an Estimathon" you ask?! It's a team contest where the goal is to create confidence intervals to difficult maths and science questions. e.g., what's the volume of the earth's oceans (in cubic km); or, how many prime numbers contain strictly increasing digits.

It's a very interactive game and focuses on some ideas that are central to what we do at Jane Street: thinking about hard problems, assessing confidence levels, trying to strike a balance between quick-and-rough estimates versus more refined solutions.

Time and date: Tuesday 21st November, 18:30-21:00

Location: Old Bank Hotel, 92-94 High Street, Oxford, OX1 4BJ

How to register: visit https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/events/.

There'll be prizes for the winning team and of course food and drinks will be provided.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Internship opportunities in Data at Facebook

Facebook London have intern openings in Summer 2018 in the Product Analytics team, and are looking for analytical, technical, data-savvy, and entrepreneurialstudents with 1 year of academia remaining after Summer 2018.

A panel of Data Scientists and Data Engineers from Facebook's London office will be at Rewley House (OX1 2JA) at 5pm on Wednesday 22nd November, and will be running an event talking about the exciting Product Analytics work that is taking place right now on a variety of Facebook products in London.

This session is designed for students who are eligible to apply for the Data Science/Engineering intern roles (one year of further study/research after the internship is required, links to more details below). We will cover what the roles involve, deep-dive on how data is driving several projects we are working on in London, and run a short interactive session exploring the types of questions we ask in interview. Refreshments will be available!

Venue: 5pm Weds 22nd November @ Rewley House, 1 Wellington Square, Oxford, OX1 2JA 
Event signup: https://datasciencetalkoxford.splashthat.com/ 
FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/538849883116401/

Data Science intern applications: https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000LTdF1UAL 
Data Science blog post: https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/demystifying-data-science-in-facebook-london

Data Engineering intern applications: https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000LTdErUAL 
Data Engineering blog post: https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/making-meaningful-connections-through-data-engineering-with-shachar-m/

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The Oxford University Computer Society (CompSoc) aims to organise meetings and events for our members to use and further their computing interests. See all of our upcoming events on our Facebook Page or visit our Website for more information about the society.