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08 Oct 2022

Notes on StrangeLoop 2022

StrangeLoop this year made me feel almost as normal as those during pre pandemic times especially in terms of size of participants and sponsors. I actually believe it had the most sponsorship so far among those I attended over the years. One noticeable company was AWS that a friend of mine joined earlier this year. So it was pretty exciting to meet up with him there. As always, the breadths of folks and topics from all walks of Software Engineering is just excellent this time as well. I took few notes on the talks that I am able to attend and would summarize them on few categories below.

Dev Experience : I consider observability to be an important part of development experience, which is always pushed back as an afterthought for almost all the startups that I worked with and I know of. The talk "Building Observability for 99% Developers" by Jean Yang just resonated with me and I am really glad that her company is building tools to make developer experience better using eBPF that has matured in the last few years. It was quite and entertaining talk and I highly recommend you check it out. Another talk that I really enjoyed is "Workflows, a new abstraction for distributed systems" by Dominik Tornow. If you are dealing with the chaos of distributed services, the abstraction that he presented make you feel like you are working with monolith (oh the happy times :) again with the advantage of cloud scalibility.

Programming Languages : I personally prefer dynamic languages (Clojure to be exact) as my tools of choice for my day to day practice of solving problems for people but I do see the benefit of type system as a guiding rail when designing an API or better yet generating code. You should check out the talk "Codegen with Types, for Humans, by Humans" by Matthew Griffith, where he talks about how to use types to generate code for human consumption. If you are working with (or say fighting with) type system that is complecting your business logic/code execution, you should check out the talk "Monad I Love You Now Get Out Of My Type System" by Gjeta Gjyshinca, where she talks about the platform that helps Scala developer to get their type system out of business logic with just five extra characters, @node, with a compiler plugin.

Data Centric Problem Solving : Strange Loop Conf have always been attractive to data centric practices and paradigms and this year was no different. There are many talks related to how to generate, architect and analyze data. The talk titled "Data-driven investigation in defense of human rights" by Christo Buschek is presented with very clear and methodical approaches to solve real problems we face around the world. I really feel like we need more of that type of work where we put technology for the benefit of our fellow human beings. I think he should do another presentation next year titled "Data-driven investigation in defense of peace and opposition of war", which surely makes me sign up for Strange Loop for one last time (Next year will be the last time you can experience Strange Loop and I highly recommend you attend to see what you have been missing).

Tags: conference strange-loop