.NET Foundation Campaign: Kevin Avignon

Why I'm running

There is a lot of divide between F# and .NET in general. I find that it is a fantastic language and tool which can leverage the .NET ecosystem. Still, it's relatively unknown and unused in situations where it could be a great choice given the situation. Since last year, I've been a member of the F# Software Foundation (FSSF). The experience I've had helping nurture the F# community could be incredibly beneficial to the .NET Foundation, to have someone who has a foot in both boards.

I take great pleasure in finding new ways to teach and mentor developers by any means possible. I have had the chance to teach and enhance my communication abilities through different avenues such as:

  • Giving technical talks at a .NET meetup,
  • Giving a conference talk at SkillShare,
  • Authoring posts on .NET topics in my blog,
  • Answering questions on Stackoverflow (top 15% overall user),
  • Advocating internally for .NET technologies that would be appropriate for the task at hand.

Since I have joined the FSSF, I've been in charge of our bi-annual mentorship program. This program focuses on pairing mentors and mentees together for 60-90 minutes per week for a 6 to 8 weeks program. During that time, the mentees can learn about F# or dive deeper inside the language by working on a specific problem or contributing to open-source software built with F#.

As a member of the .NET Foundation board, I firmly believe that I can positively impact how we can approach making .NET more attractive to developers who aren't using it and help shape the experience of the existing .NET developers. Being already a member of a board of trustees, I understand how much of a privilege it is to influence a community of technologists. I am looking forward to go from helping F#-focused developers to the .NET community.

Finally, as a member of an underrepresented group, it is hard to look up and find the heroes and potential mentor(s) that look like you. The software engineering field lacks diversity, and I believe that it is time to change the culture. It has a tremendous impact on people to find that others, like them, could make it all the way there. I want to be a source of inspiration for the future generation of developers that will come.

Experience with the Foundation

Thus far, my experience with the Foundation has been minimal. But I intend to change that with time. At the moment, I've been in contact with a member of the education committee to talk about potential ideas that could happen in the future.

What are my goals for the .NET Foundation?

My goals are focused on education and promoting our rockstar .NET developers in the community! For instance, the education committee has put together a full-stack development program for CS students based on .NET 6. Being an advocate for many things, such as F#, I'd love to build on the existing initiatives and discuss the following ideas with my peers:

  • Creating an F# course for students to learn about functional programming,
  • Creating an annual hacking event where developers can work on a specific domain (health, robotics, game development, mobile development, finance, etc.), show off their skills, and get recognized for their talent.
  • Creating an annual/bi-annual mentorship program for students and developers to learn about .NET or cultivate their existing skills.

As for promoting our developers, I'd like to create a curated newsletter of trending .NET repositories and blog posts from our community. It could either be updated weekly or monthly.

Contact Information