The early bird registration is about to end for the Strange Loop 2010 conference. This is the second year of the conference. The first year was awesome, hopefully they can only make it better.

Go to the site to see the speaker list, because it’s too long to list here.

http://strangeloop2010.com/speakers?

Early bird registration for Strange Loop is open until 8/6/10. Don’t miss out – sign up now for just $150 through Aug. 6th.
Prices:

• Early bird – $150 (till Aug 6th)
• Regular – $190 (till Oct. 1st)
• Late – $250

Strange Loop 2009 posts

http://blog.codehangover.com/strange-loop-2009-day-1/

http://blog.codehangover.com/strange-loop-2009-day-2/
php

Related Posts

• Strange Loop 2009 – Day 2
• Strange Loop 2009 – Day 1

My notes and thoughts about day two of strange loop 2009.

Also be sure to check out my Day one notes.

jQuery – Matt Taylor

• http://weblog.dangertree.net/
• Showed numerous examples how easy jQuery makes it to select and edit HTML elements. Made me realize I should use jQuery even in small apps.
• Also showed examples of the jQuery AJAX functionality

Mobile Development 101

• http://www.slideshare.net/michael.galpin
• http://fupeg.blogspot.com/
• This session was full which doesn’t surprise me since mobile development is about to get easier thanks to Android.
• Started off going how to develop apps for the iPhone
  • The emulator and development software only run on a Mac
  • Has to be written in Objective C
    • I wanted to throw up when I saw the objective c examples
    • No garbage collection. Memory is limited on phones so this is an important issue.
    • Maybe I’m just to much of a simpleton, but I really don’t ever want to write any objective C
  • MVC framework – cocoa touch
  • No background processing on iphone
• Android
  • Can run any language that is built on the JVM
  • XML format for UI develoment
  • Does not use standard MVC pattern. Uses something called Activities and Intents.
  • There are multiple android emulators
• Mobile dev best practices (not specific to android or iphone)
  • Need lean web services
  • Limit network traffic
  • Limit audio/video/images
• Mobile Web Application
  • Alternative to writing an iPhone/Android app
  • A lot of phones have the same browser now
  • Some mobile browsers leak memory

Entrepreneur Talk – Panel Discussion

• This book was mentioned, Outliers: The Story of Success
• Someone said that you need irrational arrogance to start your own company.
• Another person said that start ups are all offense and no defense. Just keep putting stuff out, early and often
• The idea was presented that everyone has risk even the person working for a company because you can be fired at any time
• The current work culture is sort of like having one client at a time because developers change jobs so often.

Polyglot Grails – Jeff Brown

• http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/conference/speaker/jeff_brown
• http://javajeff.blogspot.com/
• You can use many languages with Grails. Jeff even gave an example of Grails with a simple language he created
• methodMissing(string name, args) is a very interesting feature of Groovy

Minimalism – Alex Payne

• http://twitter.com/Al3X
• http://al3x.net/books_talks.html
• Interesting talk about little m minimalism and how it be applied to code
• Alex made a few comments about how programming is a young field

List of slides on strangeloop.com
Day two sessions

Related Posts

• Strange Loop 2009 – Day 1
• Strange Loop 2010 – Early Bird Registration

A new developer conference has started in St Louis this year named Strange Loop. Normally I don’t go to developer conferences because they are either in a different country or on the coasts. This one was close by in St Louis, MO. And from the quality of speakers and diverse sessions I predict next years conference will sell out very quickly unless they increase the capacity. Below are my overall topics/themes I took away from the conference and some interesting points from each talk I witnessed along with links to the speaker’s site and slide show if available.


Day two

Strange Loop Thoughts Overall

• open source, open source, open source
• every talk envolved open source. The FUD around open source is finally withering away.
• DRY constant theme
• Mobile development is upon us and will be for maybe ever
• Scala, Clojure, Groovy are HOT languages on the JVM
• Great conference that covered many relevant topics
• All the talks were technical, no boring management oriented sales pitches

Functional Ruby – Dean Wampler

• http://deanwampler.com/
• Link to slide show
• I atteneded this talk because I’m interested in the functional programming line of thought. And I don’t get to see much ruby code.
• Recommends learning a functiona programming language: Scala, Hascal, Cojure
• Multiprocessor systems are making it more important to use threads. Threads and synchronizaton is hard to get right. So functional languages that have immutable objects/values are easier because immutable objects/values don’t require synchronization.
• Try to avoid a bloated domain objects that have numerous properties to fullfill multiple requirements for different use cases. Have smaller objects for seperate uses.

Polyglot Programming – Dean Wampler

• Link to slide show
• polyglot programming: using more than one programming language. Not like using CSS, JS. But like using Groovy and Java or Groovy and Clojure.
• Dean thinks that Scala could become very popular in the future
• Hybrid object and functional language
• Multiple cpus is driving the need for functional languages
• Mentioned the famous quote: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
  – Antoine de Saint-Exuper

Griffon (Swing just got fun again) – James Williams

• http://jameswilliams.be/blog/entry/index
• http://groovy.codehaus.org/Griffon
• Mentioned that the swring application framework is dead
• Griffon is the unofficial grails for the desktop
• It really did looks rails like from the project layout to the build process
• Suggested Groovy In Action for anyone that wanted to earn Groovy

Future of Java – Bob Lee

• http://crazybob.org
• Writes his talks in Java. I’m serious. Here is the SVN repo for his talks
  • http://crazybobs-talks.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/
• Talked about how/why he wanted better resource management in Java.
• Said he searched the JDK and found that 74 out of 110 the JDK has leaks for a certain IO functionality.
• Talked about his work on JSR-330 dependency injection in JDK
  • @Inject annotation
• New quicksort that was developed for Android JVM (Harmony)

Day two


Day One Sessions

Related Posts

• Strange Loop 2009 – Day 2
• Strange Loop 2010 – Early Bird Registration