So today was, lets say Day 0 of Strange Loop. Aside from some hiccups on the plane to St Louis regarding a very important part of the plane (we were delayed for half an hour while they fixed the flushing mechanism in the lavatory), things have gone well. The actual conference begins tomorrow, but today were the optional workshops and, of course, was the day most people arrived for the conference proper. Let me preface this post by stating that the rooftop bar is very nice. Where else can you drink Scotch while discussing the uptake of Clojure within business software companies with some of the smartest people in the industry? But as a warning, that might impact the quality of this post…
Anyway, I had signed up for only one workshop, Nathan Marz’s Cascalog workshop. Cascalog is a Clojure based library for data processing with Hadoop. Think SQL on steroids. I have interests in both Clojure and Hadoop, and yet don’t have too much experience with databases, so it was an obvious session for me to sign up for. It was a three hour workshop, but at the start Nathan warned he was used to giving similar workshops for around 9 hours so this one might be a little rushed. I had initially laughed, thinking 3 hours sounded like a long time, but it definitely was rushed. Yet we learned quite a lot. Cascalog definitely is a powerful library which I will certainly play around with later. I was very impressed with the quality of the queries that could be made with what seemed very intuitive Clojure code, not the convoluted nonsense many SQL queries end up as.
Tomorrow comes the hard part though, choosing between several very different, yet very interesting talks that are scheduled at the same time. In fairness to the conference planners, with the number of talks that look interesting it would have been mathematically impossible for them to schedule everything so I could attend everything that I wanted. But still, as Alan Dipert of Relevance said, the thing I am least looking forward to is having to choose between talks. I just hope enough will be recorded that I will be able to watch the ones I miss later.