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Notes from Strange Loop

Last week I had the privilege of attending and speaking at Strange Loop last week (here’s the video of my talk!), and I wanted to mention some of the talks I attended as well as highlights from the conference.

Talks

Here’s what I went to (outside of the keynotes), and their videos:

Propositions as Typesvideo

HIGHLY recommended! This speaker is discussing the topic of the paper that we read together on Turing-Incomplete with our guest, Brian McKenna. It’s one of my favorite episodes of the show.

Strange Loops: Capturing Knots with Powerful Notationsvideo

News to me: knot theory is a thing? It seems like it’s a sport for mathematicians. Good talk for expanding your mind.

Ideology – (no video posted yet)

This was from Gary Bernhardt, of “wat” video fame. I expect if/when the video is posted, it will also be popular. A not-so-technical talk about religious wars in programming.

Sweaters as a Servicevideo

I was so happy to get to see/meet Amy (or as I think of her in my head, Sailor Mercury). A fun, accessible talk about hacking old things to figure out how they work and eventually getting a grumpy cat sweater.

Apache Kafka and the Next 700 Stream Processing Systemsvideo

I didn’t totally understand this one, but my buddy Kiran was watching with me and suggested I read the paper about Data Flow to get this sort of stuff.

Non-Imperative Network Programmingvideo

One of those “really interesting, but I have no idea what happened!” talks. I loved the speaker’s style and plan on re-watching this one.

Elm in Productionvideo

Mostly a pitch for Elm. Might be interesting if you (like me) are a fan/interested in Elm, but otherwise a bit “kool-aid”-y, as someone put it on Twitter.

A History of Programming Languages for Two Voicesvideo

This was very fun to see in person, curious to see how people like the video. Essentially a mix-tape of music over the last century interspersed with what was going on in computing at the time.

big-bang: the world, the universe, and the network in the programming languagevideo

Racket talk!! I got most of this understanding-wise (I was quite tired at this point), but really found the speaker’s discussion of pedagogy interesting, as he was talking about teaching high schoolers especially.

Relevance of ClojureScriptvideo

Gotta support my buddy and podcast co-host Jearvon. This will be interesting if you’re curious about ClojureScript and maybe poked around with it just a little.

Other things that happened

The major highlight in my notes on other things was Lean Coffee.

My buddy Trevor (who sadly moved away from Philly last year) ran sessions both mornings of the conference, and it was really interesting! Imagine a conversation group run by Kanban board … that’s Lean Coffee. 110% more interesting than it sounds (… if you have opinions similar to myself about “Agile all the things!”)

Mob programming! “Coding Dojo” was an event option during pre-conf, and I went to a session where the chosen language was Go. Given the size of the room, the front row was people who rotated in to be navigator (talking about what we should do, often discussing with the rest of the room) or the driver (the person doing the typing, a nice way to get your hands on a new language).

And of course, my other favorite thing of the conference remains that (aka, the City Museum). I also got out of downtown St. Louis this year and went to Lulu’s twice and enjoyed checking out that neighborhood.

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