Strange Loop 2014

16 Nov 2014

In September, I attended the Strange Loop Conference in St. Louis by way of their diversity scholarship. I’ll admit I was a little nervous about attending as a Ruby developer, as I’d overheard the conference’s unoffical byline: “an annual event to destroy object oriented progamming”. I got to experience a lot of awesome things and meet really cool people but in the interest of brevity I’ve only shared a few of my favorite experiences here.

Pre-Conference: Powered by JavaScript

There were a lot of awesome sessions scheduled for the day before the conference began, including a full day JavaScript hosted by Manning Publications, which I attended. I’m a web developer but JavaScript is not my strong point so I got to see a lot of really interesting & thought provoking talks. They even gave everyone who pre-registered a copy of their Single Page Web Applications book I think one of my favorites was Sarah Groff-Palermo’s talk on Art.JS. I really enjoy seeing people do creative things with what is ordinarily considered a creative toolset, like programming.

I also caught a talk on React.JS that I enjoyed. I have dabbled with some JavaScript frameworks but React.JS is supposed to be a bit more functional so I think after the course I’m currently taking is finished, I’ll probably start learning about React.

Favorite Sessions

All of the talks I saw were really awesome, but I did have 2 favorites by far. I think I liked them both because they made functional programming feel much more accessible to me.

Felienne Hermans on Excel for Programmers

Felienne Hermans’ talk on Excel for programmers was one of my favorite talks. Initially, I didn’t want to attend because I got my start in programming writing VBA in Excel & I didn’t really want to dredge up those memories. Once I read the talk description, I knew I couldn’t miss it. Felienne proved that Excel was a programming language and that it was also a very good functional programming language.

What was most amazing to me was seeing the test suites she was working on for Excel, people might joke about being “Excel Jockeys” but in all truth, these spreadsheets can become complex financial decision making systems that need to have verifiable data. Which is, in my opinion, the perfect scenario to implement a test suite. Afterwards, I spoke with her & joked that if I had found out about her research before I found out about Ruby, I’d probably be a grad student helping write a test framework for excel.

Julia Evans’ “You Can Be a Kernel Hacker!”

This talk was pure fun from start to finish. I was concerned that the “you” in the talk title was a functional programmer, but I figured I’d survived (& understood some) the talks I’d heard up until then so I might be alright. Julia did a great job of breaking down the scary parts of kernel hacking & making the audience feel comfortable.

My favorite part of this talk was actually Julia’s response to one of the questions. When someone asked how she kept from wrecking her system while working on this, she said “I didn’t” & everyone laughed. It was really cool that she was comfortable admitting that in front of a huge crowd of programmers and all of them thought it was funny that she didn’t provide a detailed technical answer.

Lambda Ladies

After the first full day of the conference, and before the pre-conference party at St. Louis’ City Museum there was a party hosted by Lambda Ladies. It was really nice to meet women who write functional languages on the regular and I didn’t feel as nervous about going to the pre-conference after making a few more new friends.

A Strange Loop Indeed

After the conference, I knew I wanted to learn more about functional programming but I wasn’t sure where to get started. A friend suggested we check out Deltfx’ Intro to Functional Programming edx course which is taught using the Haskell language, and once again I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Functional Programming. It’s only a 6 week course, but I think that if I hadn’t attended Strange Loop this year there is probably no way I’d have registered for the course.

Before Strange Loop, I was afraid that functional programming wasn’t for me and I wouldn’t fit in because I didn’t know very much. But I found that while I was there, that by being a developer who gets excited about learning and stretching my brain in new ways that Strange Loop and Functional Programming are for me (& probably for you too!)

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