I just returned from the Strange Loop conference earlier tonight. I don’t really have time to get into too much detail of what I saw (I do have to get back on Eastern Standard Time), but let me say it was a great conference. Some of the standouts were Rich Hickey’s keynote (if you’ve never heard him speak before, watch either Are We There Yet or Hammock Driven Development from last years Clojure Conj while waiting for the Strange Loop recording to be made available), Nathan Marz’s talk on Storm (I’m really going to have to start searching for a problem to use this for), the language panel (even though it was accidentally cut short), Erik Meijer’s keynote on Big Data, and Blake Mizerany’s talk on Doozer. And the part of Sussman’s speech I was able to understand before my brain started to short out was great too. Unfortunately there were a lot of talks I missed which I will have to wait for the recordings to come out. That might have been the biggest problem with the conference (well, other than the elevator fiasco), there arguably were too many tracks with competing talks at the same time (most blocks had 7 talks to choose between). Of course there were a lot of talks scheduled and only a limited amount of time to give them in, but perhaps it would have been possible to fit in more time slots by varying the times a bit more. While some talks definitely required the 50 minute slot and in fact often went over, others had less information to present and could had made do with a shorter, maybe 15 minutes to half hour block “lighting” talks. Then a couple of extra time slots could have been made by splitting a few hours up. But all in all, it was a great conference (again, except for the elevators). I’ll post my notes and reactions to the speeches I saw in the days to come…
Also as a note, the Clojure Conj has posted their schedule, and it looks like a great lineup as well (including several speakers I just saw this week). Its local, so it will be easier to attend, assuming I can manage to take some more time off…