Blogs

Today I'm introducing a new promotional program for bloggers!

If you write a blog about your experiences at the Strange Loop 2009 conference OR why you're excited about attending Strange Loop 2010 between now and Thursday Aug. 5th, I will give you a choice between:

• A discount code for $25 off on Strange Loop 2010 registration. If you've already registered, I'll send you a refund
• A t-shirt from Strange Loop 2009

To participate:

I have added a Student attendee rate of $100 due to the continuing interest from students at local schools like Washington University, SIU Edwardsville, etc. If you are a student and can supply a valid ID at registration time, then feel free to register at this rate!

I have released the full schedule for Strange Loop 2010 and it is (in my humble opinion) a truly mind-blowing set of talks and speakers.

Check out these keynotes:

• Guy Steele (Oracle) - "How to Think about Parallel Programming: Not!"
• Douglas Crockford (Yahoo) - "Heresy and Heretical Open Source: A Heretic's Perspective"
• Billy Newport (IBM) - "Enterprise NoSQL: Silver Bullet or Poison Pill?"
• Hilary Mason (bit.ly) - "Machine Learning: A Love Story"

Time for an update on Strange Loop 2010!

Particulars

I plan to integrate these links into the site a bit better later but I did want to mention that the first set of Strange Passion talks from Blueberry Hill were recorded (unbeknown to me) by Bryan Williams. He was kind enough to edit and upload the videos for public consumption and you can find those four talks here:

http://strangeloop.blip.tv/posts?view=archive

I put together a little wrap-up with pictures and some other info that you can find right here.

I've finished tabulating the Strange Loop ratings and I'm pleased to announce the Strange Loop 2009 Rock Stars!

The top rated speaker was easily Charles Nutter with an average rating of 4.79/5. Several other speakers also garnered high ranks across the board and are the 2009 Rock Stars:

1. Charles Nutter
2. Ken Sipe
3. Jeff Brown
4. Bob Lee
5. Alex Payne
6. Matt Taylor

Many other speakers also got excellent ratings and in general I am very, very pleased with how the conference schedule turned out.

I created a tumblr link blog for Strange Loop where I'll post any blogs or other referring links of interest in case you want to stuff that in your feed reader:

Strange Loop link blog

I have slides from most of the talks and you can find them on this page. A few more are still coming in and will show up there as they do.

There were a number of video and projector issues at Strange Loop but we managed to have every presenter give every presentation. I have to call out Hudson Akridge though who did a heroic, even EPIC presentation job. His talk was heavily code-based and required his laptop, which only worked while connected directly to the projector.