TITLE: Strange Loop 3: This and That AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: October 10, 2021 1:53 PM DESC: ----- 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:
my Strange Loop 2021 home set-up, with laptop on the left, 29-inch monitor in the center, and a beverage to the right
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: 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. -----