Blogs

Just for fun, I was brainstorming some possible ad tag lines for Strange Loop and hit on the idea of comparing it to other things it was nothing like.

My first list:

• Just like Burning Man. Except for the desert, bonfires, and mutant vehicles.
• Just like Woodstock. Except for the music, acid, and hippies.
• Just like Lollapalooza. Except for the music, mosh pits, and mud.
• Just like Star Wars. Except for the jedis, droids, and bad acting.
• Just like the Matrix. Except for the intelligent robots, alternate reality, and kung fu.

Charles Oliver Nutter (@headius) is well-known for his work on JRuby, the JVM-based implementation of Ruby. During his time at Sun, he has also been an enthusiastic early adopter of the work done by the JVM team for JSR 292 and invokedynamic to allow more flexible method invocation, a key feature needed by dynamic languages.

Mike Dirolf (@mdirolf) will be speaking at the Strange Loop conference about the non-relational database MongoDB. Michael works on MongoDB, specifically on the Python and Ruby client drivers.

Just a few quick updates on Strange Loop.

1. There have been a couple of speaker cancellations from Robert Fischer and Michael Ernst and unfortunately they won't be able to speak this year. I'm really sorry to lose those great talks. But fortunately.....
2. I have added a talk about Apache Cassandra from Stu Hood

Mario Aquino (@MarioAquino) is a Principal Software Engineer at Object Computing (OCI) and is doing a talk at Strange Loop with the intriguing title "Zen Mind, Warrior Spirit: Antithetical Mindsets with Lessons for Agile Developers". I talked to Mario about what we might learn.

I was lucky enough to score an exclusive interview about Strange Loop with David Angry, a lead character in the Twittch comic drawn by Eric Burke.

Mark Volkmann is a partner at Object Computing (OCI) and is doing a talk at Strange Loop called Tackling Concurrency with Software Transactional Memory. I had a chance to ask him a few questions about the talk and his experiences working with Clojure.

Alex: What is software transactional memory anyways?

If your company plans on sending tens (or hundreds :) of developers I've announced some new group rates. Note, these rates only apply to employees of the same company and are based on the current date-based rate category.

That is, right now the base rate is $75 per person but in a week or so, the price goes up to $110. If you register your company's developers now, the base rate is $75 - in a week it goes up.

That's right - August 14th is the last day for $75 registration. After that, the price will go up to $110. See the full price schedule. Register now!

This is of course a transparent and blatant attempt to entice you to register early. The reason conferences do this (myself included) is to even out registration a bit more, otherwise everything happens at the end.

Alex Payne sent me some more info on his keynote for Strange Loop today. I thought I would drop it here in case you're interested: