Ideas

Strange Loop 2011 : Retrospect

At Strange Loop 2010, we were blown away by the diverse knowledge and skill set from the attendees and speakers alike. This year was no exception. With names like Sussman, Hickey and Meijer as keynote speakers, a traditional conference would use them as anchors to provide substance to an otherwise sales overloaded event. Strange Loop 2011 not only offered prophetic visions from icons in the industry but also opened the floor to lesser-known experts that shared their experiences, knowledge and wisdom. In addition, all of the speakers are accessible in the hallways, attending sessions as attendees and after-hours. A unique experience indeed.

Day 0

The three-hour workshops presented by Hilary Mason of bit.ly on Machine Learning and Bryan O'Sullivan on Functional Programming in Haskell were incredible. Small class size (30 people, give or take) and razor sharp focus by the presenters allowed for class participation during and after the session. Both speakers had a firm grasp of their domain topic and did an excellent job of presenting their topics.

A "liquid breakout session" if you will was hosted by Arc90 at the 360 Lounge top floor of the conference hotel. Having met a few of the Arc90 guys in their offices in NY last year, it was another opportunity to meet in person. We had a great discussion with Avi about startup growing pains, technology and being strategic when honing skills in new languages and infrastructure. Learn what you can, stay current, follow your interests. Developing a balance between doing what's fun and doing what pays the bills, hopefully the two intersect.

Day 1

Day 1 started with a keynote by Erik Meijer on the duality of SQL and the noSQL movement, category theory and the importance of composition. To much fanfare and applause, Nathan Marz open sourced Storm as a public project on Github. Andrei Alexandrescu presented Generic Programming Galore using D which explored his "dream min" function implemented in D, something not likely to be implemented in any other language because, well, other languages don't allow you to do it.

The day closed with a keynote by Gerald Sussman in which he posits everything we've learned about computing doesn't begin to compare to the knowledge required to build something as complex as a living thing. Being able to describe clearly and efficiently how a complex system should work, in classic Sussmanian style.

Day 2

Day 2 began with Dean Wampler presenting Heresies vs. Dogmas through four examples (Waterfall/Agile, Design Patterns, CORBA/REST, and Middleware/ORMs). He even reserved the last few minutes of his talk to identify the architecture photos he used in his slide deck. Elegant presentation and showmanship. The Distributed Data Analysis with Hadoop and R, while informative, lacked the more technical punch most presenters opted for. The tag team approach from Jonathan Seidman and Ramesh Venkataramaiah was well executed and described the "business problem" of understanding customer trends and "technical problem" of making something that works.

After lunch was a Language Panel with audience participation and a unanimous vote from the panel that "LISP was the language they wish they invented."

David Nolen stole the show with his "Mapping Dilemma" talk and the libraries he wrote to bring mapping and general abstraction to Clojure. What was amazing about his talk was his ability to clearly describe process, what was happening in his brain, to address this problem. This was one of the strongest and technically demanding talks to follow. Not because David isn't a good speaker, but because of the very nature of 45 minutes to bring everyone in the room up to speed with something that takes many months to grasp.

Day 2 closed with Rich Hickey on the Complexity of Simplicity, or something like that. Through clear, witty dialog, Rich guided us on a tour in which we learned that "Simple" isn't easy and "Complex" isn't hard. Simple means it's not braided or tied up in knots. It may still be hard to learn or grok but the "thing" we're developing should be simple. If you only watch one keynote from StrangeLoop 2011, watch this one.

Conclusion

Typically, the value of a conference comes with hallway talk over actual technical presentations. A chance to mingle with peers, engage in discussion about the latest garbage collection techniques, or simply to learn about exciting research in esoteric technologies. Strange Loop has all of that, if your brain isn't already mush from trying to grok the presentations.

tl;dr

Alex Miller (and his trusted band of helpers) once again raised the bar for defining what a technology conference should be. The topics presented were current, relevant and thought provoking. Cramped hallways and poor placement of lunch/coffee/snacks made navigating the flood of people difficult. Coffee/tea was only available in the morning and late afternoon, which made for lots of cranky and sleepy zombies Loopers (author included). Sussman and Hickey as keynote speakers were entertaining and mind-blowing. Cardinals tickets (with an 11-6 victory!), a classy touch.

Thank you Alex, see you next year.