Dear fellow LUV members, Compose::Melbourne is running this year for the third time, coming up in just over a week: http://www.composeconference.org/2018-melbourne/ It's a two-day event, aimed at building and supporting the functional-programming community in Melbourne. So if you're at all interested in functional programming, newbie or expert, come along and learn and meet people sharing that interest. I know this is not Linux-specific, but most of the main functional-programming systems are FOSS (and Linux-friendly), and functional programming is being increasingly adopted in industry. Day One, Monday 27 August, is the conference, with a dozen presentations on functional programming (FP) through the day, including keynote "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Metaphor" by Julie Moronuki, author of the book, Haskell Programming from First Principles. Day Two, Tuesday 28 August, is the "unconference": an informal day of getting together to share FP ideas and experience, although we will be running a few workshops and sessions, including CRASHKELL, an introductory Haskell workshop for beginners. You can read the webpage for more information about the programme and registration. In particular, if you're planning to attend any of the workshops, check the requirements. You'll probably need to bring a laptop, and for some workshops you'll need to install software ahead of time — though we can help you with that on the day if need be. We really want to help build the diversity of the functional-programming community, so we've tried to keep the registration cost as low as possible. But if you'd like to attend, and still face difficulty paying the registration fee, mail me, ljk+compose@ljk.id.au. We have a limited number of free tickets available for this purpose. Also feel free to mail me if you have any other questions not answered on the website. Hope to see some of you at Compose::Melbourne! — Smiles, Les (also Compose::Melbourne committee member).