TITLE: Strange Loop 3: This and That
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 10, 2021 1:53 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
The week after Strange Loop has been a blur of catching up with all
the work I didn't do while attending the conference, or at least
trying. That is actually good news for my virtual conference:
despite attending Strange Loop from the comfort of my basement, I
managed not to get sucked into the vortex of regular business going
on here.
A few closing thoughts on the conference:
• Speaking of "the comfort of my basement", here is what my
Strange Loop conference room looked like:
The big screen is a 29" ultra-wide LG monitor that I bought last year
on the blog recommendation of
Robert Talbert,
which has easily been my best tech purchase of the pandemic. On that
screen you'll see vi.to, the streaming platform used by Strange Loop,
running in Safari. To its right, I have emacs open on a file of notes
and occasionally an evolving blog draft. There is a second Safari
window open below emacs, for links picked up from the talks and the
conference Slack channels.
On the MacBookPro to left, I am running Slack, another emacs shell for
miscellaneous items, and a PDF of the conference schedule, marked up
with the two talks I'm considering in each time slot.
That set-up served me well. I can imagine using it again in the
future.
• Attending virtually has its downsides, but also its upsides.
Saturday morning, one attendee wrote in the Slack
#virtual-attendees channel:
Virtual FTW! Attending today from a campsite in upstate New York
and enjoying the fall morning air
I was not camping, but I experienced my own virtual victories at
lunch time, when I was able to go for a walk with my wife on our
favorite walking trails.
• I didn't experience many technical glitches at the conference.
There were some serious AV issues in the room during Friday's second
slot. Being virtual, I was able to jump easily into and out of the
room, checking in on another talk while they debugged on-site. In
another talk, we virtual attendees missed out on seeing the
presenter's slides. The speaker's words turned out to be enough for
me to follow. Finally, Will Byrd's closing keynote seemed to drop
its feed a few times, requiring viewers to refresh their browsers
occasionally. I don't have any previous virtual conferences to
compare to, but this all seemed pretty minor. In general, the video
and audio feedbacks were solid and of high fidelity.
• One final note, not related to The Virtual Experience.
Like many conferences, Strange Loop has so many good talks that I
usually have to choose among two or three talks I want to see in
each slot. This year, I kept track of alt-Strange Loop, the
schedule of talks I didn't attend but really wanted to. Comparing
this list to the list of talks I did attend gives a representative
account of the choices I faced. It also would make for a solid
conference experience in its own right:
- FRI 02 -- Whoops! I Rewrote it in Rust (Brian Martin)
- FRI 03 -- Keeping Your Open Source Project Accessible to All
(Treva Williams)
- FRI 04 -- Impacting Global Policy by Understanding Litter Data
(Sean Doherty)
- FRI 05 -- Morel, A Functional Query Language (Julian Hyde)
- FRI 06 -- Software for Court Appointed Special Advocates
(Linda Goldstein)
- SAT 02 -- Asami: Turn your JSON into a Graph in 2 Lines
(Paula Gearon)
- SAT 03 -- Pictures Of You, Pictures Of Me, Crypto Steganography
(Sean Marcia)
- SAT 04 -- Carbon Footprint Aware Software Development Tejas Chopra
- SAT 05 -- How Flutter Can Change the Future of Urban Communities
(Edward Thornton)
- SAT 06 -- Creating More Inclusive Tech Spaces: Paths Forward
(Amy Wallhermfechtel)
There is a tie for the honor of "talk I most wanted to see but didn't":
Wallhermfechtel on creating more inclusive tech spaces and Marcia on
crypto steganography. I'll be watching these videos on YouTube some
time soon!
As I mentioned in
Day 1's post,
this year I tried to force myself out of usual zone, to attend a wider
range of talks. Both lists of talks reflect this mix.
At heart I am an academic with a fondness for programming languages.
The tech talks generally lit me up more. Even so, I was inspired by
some of the talks focused on community and the use of technology for
the common good. I think I used my two days wisely.
That is all. Strange Loop sometimes gives me the sort of inspiration
overdose that Molly Mielke laments in
this tweet.
This year, though, Strange Loop 2021 gave me something I needed after
eighteen months of pandemic (and even more months of growing
bureaucracy in my day job): a jolt of energy, and a few thoughts for
the future.
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