Strange Loop 2013
2013-09-18..2013-09-20
St. Louis, United States
[Strange Loop 2013, Strange Loop 2014, Strange Loop 2015, Strange Loop 2016, Strange Loop 2017, Strange Loop 2018, Strange Loop 2019, Strange Loop 2021, Strange Loop 2022, Strange Loop 2023]
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Machine Learning for Relevance and Serendipity | Jenny Finkel | 39m |
Prismatic builds a real-time personalization engine that combines NLP topic classification (about 5000 topics) with a logistic regression ranker and feature… | ||
| Making Software Development Make Sense to Everyone | Jen Myers | 58m |
Creates new entry points and shows what works: an Dev Bootcamp nine-week program that teaches beginners how to learn, a local Girl Develop It Columbus (2011)… | ||
| What Is a Strange Loop and What is it Like To Be One? | Douglas Hofstadter | 52m |
Claim: the human strange loop — a self built by repeated self‑perception — is a compressed, causally misleading model rather than a magical agent. Evidence… | ||
| The Trouble With Types | Martin Odersky | 49m |
Argues that static typing becomes practical by collapsing generics, existentials and higher-kinded types into name-based refinements, outlines a prototype… | ||
| Taking PHP Seriously | Keith Adams | 41m |
Claim: PHP’s choices around save-and-reload workflow, request-isolated shared‑nothing state, and simple per-request concurrency materially cut bug cost and… | ||
| Functional Reactive Programming in Elm | Evan Czaplicki | 45m |
Explains how Elm implements Functional Reactive Programming with concrete tools: signals, lift and foldp for time-varying values, an FPS source (fps 25) and a… | ||
| Exercises in Style | Crista Lopes | 39m |
Implements the same term-frequency program in nine concrete styles (procedural, functional, object, continuation/callback, map-reduce, etc.), with working code… | ||
| Clojure core.async | Rich Hickey | 44m |
A Clojure library implements CSP-style channels so independent logical threads communicate via queue-like endpoints rather than tangled callbacks, with a go… | ||
| Partitions for Everyone! | Kyle Kingsbury | 43m |
A Jepsen harness runs five-node clusters under injected partitions and logs operations to check linearizability and loss. Zookeeper behaves as CP: 401/401… | ||
| JavaScript ... for Science! | Angelina Fabbro, Bill Mills | 40m |
Research labs accumulate technical debt—monolithic, untested code, copy‑pasted guts and even JavaScript emitted as C strings—while detector complexity jumps… | ||
| Finding a Way Out | Chris Granger | 34m |
Claim: programming fails because code is largely unobservable, indirect, and full of incidental complexity. Concrete work uses Light Table to make execution… | ||
| Go Circuit: Distributing the Go Language and Runtime | Petar Maymounkov | 40m |
Claims a language-extension that makes distributed Go feel like single-process Go by adding a spawn operator "spawn" to start goroutines remotely, compiles… | ||
| Servo: Designing and Implementing a Parallel Browser | Jack Moffitt | 41m |
Servo aims to build a browser engine that actually parallelizes parsing, layout and rendering using Rust for memory safety, implements a copy-on-write DOM so… | ||
| Generation Minecraft - Kids Building Software | Seth Schroeder | 41m |
Claim: Minecraft drives more hands-on creation than schools do, kids are building real systems. Tools shown: red stone mojo, command blocks*, vanilla servers… | ||
| Dart For the Language Enthusiast | Bob Nystrom | 45m |
Dart claims to be a browser-first language that compiles to JavaScript and ships a native VM for debugging, it uses top-level lazy evaluation, offers an… | ||
| Thinking DSLs for Massive Visualization | Leo Meyerovich | 38m |
Superconductor is a browser DSL that compiles high‑level layout and data code into parallel JavaScript targeting web workers WebCL and WebGL and uses… | ||
| Patterns for Scalable Web Services in Go | Richard Crowley | 37m |
Concrete recipes for building scalable HTTP services in Go: use the standard library HTTP primitives as the baseline, augment routing and JSON handling with… | ||
| Java Puzzlers, Strange Loop Edition | Bob Lee, Josh Bloch | 40m |
Forty-five minutes of five concrete Java puzzlers with working code, surprising outputs and fixes: a hash table contains looks at values not keys bug that… | ||
| How to Teach Your Kid to Code with Hopskotch | Samantha John | 45m |
US schools teaching computer science drop below 20% over two decades while demand projects 1.4 million new jobs by 2020 against only 400,000 CS students… | ||
| Native Speed on the Web: JavaScript and asm.js | Alon Zakai | 30m |
Argues that compiled-to-JavaScript pipelines actually hit near-native speeds: C/C++ compiled with Emscripten into asm.js runs heavy apps like Unreal Epic… | ||
| Getting Pushy: Pushing Data From Server to Browser | David Pollak | 45m |
Lift demonstrates a working server-push stack: a single HTTP long-pole multiplex from browser to server, streaming promises that can be fulfilled repeatedly… | ||
| Why Ruby Isn't Slow | Alex Gaynor | 36m |
Claim: Ruby can be fast when its VM eliminates hash lookups and boxing rather than changing the language. Implementation: a VM called Topaz built on… | ||
| Spanner - Google's Distributed Database | Sebastian Kanthak | 41m |
Spanner claims a planet-scale, transactional database that partitions and replicates across thousands of servers and still gives row/column models and SQL. It… | ||
| High Availability at Braintree | Paul Gross | 36m |
Braintree handles roughly $10B in processing (~19,000 transactions per minute) and aims for four to five nines by using concrete techniques: switching MySQL to… | ||
| Web Apps in Clojure and ClojureScript with Pedestal | Brenton Ashworth | 39m |
Shows a real project: a sales‑funnel visualization ingesting about 1,000 events/sec and updating the browser twice a second, with architecture (collectors →… | ||
| The JavaScript Interpreter, Interpreted | Martha Girdler | 29m |
Explains how JavaScript actually creates and executes function objects: a distinct creation phase builds a variable object (with arguments), hoisting pulls… | ||
| Sync is the Future of Mobile Data | Chris Anderson | 41m |
Claim: the NoSQL document model plus opportunistic sync makes offline-first mobile apps practical. Concrete build: an embedded Couchbase Lite client… | ||
| Scala vs Idris: Dependent types, now and in the future | Miles Sabin, Edwin Brady | 40m |
A head-to-head of concrete engineering: Idris demonstrates full dependent types, builds sized vectors and an effects DSL that type-checks, compiles and runs… | ||
| Dissecting Clojure Reducers | Renzo Borgatti | 39m |
Claim: Clojure reducers let you compose mapping and reducing so transformation and accumulation run in a single parallel loop. Implementation details shown… | ||
| Raft - The Understandable Distributed Protocol | Ben Johnson | 37m |
Raft presents concrete rules: leader election plus log replication, randomized 150–300 ms election timeout, and quorum commits that require a majority so split… | ||
| Programming a 144-computer chip to minimize power | Chuck Moore | 40m |
GreenArrays ships a 144‑core asynchronous chip that actually runs at 666 Mips and measures 7 pJ/inst, with idle cores drawing ~100 nW and active cores ~4 mW… | ||
| Concurrency and Parallel Computing in JavaScript | Stephan Herhut | 41m |
Overview of concrete artifacts and limits: River Trail proposes parallel array methods like mapPar reducePar scan scatter filter and has a River Trail… | ||
| Make Your Mobile Apps Accessible to All | Heath Borders | 42m |
Shows concrete iOS and Android fixes: use UIAccessibility traits, set isAccessibilityElement and accessibilityLabel, build dynamic elements with accessibility… | ||
| Add ALL the things: abstract algebra meets analytics | Avi Bryant | 38m |
Claim: many analytics problems reduce to a single abstraction so one aggregation engine handles counts, max, top‑k, histograms, uniques and frequencies. Tools… | ||
| CQRS with Erlang | Bryan Hunter | 36m |
Erlang an industry-proven functional programming language that simplifies writing reliable, concurrent, distributed systems.
CQRS is an architectural pattern… | ||
| How Developers can treat Ovarian Cancer | Mridula Jayaraman | 37m |
An evidence engine that turns patient sequencing into treatment recommendations is already built and deployed: it parses ~0.5 TB per genome, normalizes public… | ||
| A Relational Exploration of the Chomsky Hierarchy | Daniel Friedman, William E. Byrd | 50m |
miniKanren implementation claims to encode deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata plus push‑down automata and Turing Machines and it actually… | ||
| Continuations on the Web and in your OS | Jay McCarthy | 40m |
Shows that delimited continuations let a server capture and store the exact continuation as a URL so forms resume where expected, implemented in the racket web… | ||
| Category Theory: An Abstraction for Anything | Alissa Pajer | 36m |
Shows how a concrete git commit DAG becomes a category (objects = commits, morphisms = reachability), defines initial/terminal objects, and implements examples… | ||
| Creative Machines | Joseph Wilk | 41m |
Claims and concrete systems guide the decision: machines excel at exploration and combination but lack a reliable value function, so experiments focus on tools… | ||
| Xiki: GUI and Text Interfaces are Converging | Craig Muth | 41m |
A live demo shows Xiki as a tiny UI language that actually builds working interfaces from plain files: a shell command core plus a web server and editor… | ||
| Bust the Android Fragmentation Myth | Chiu-Ki Chan | 33m |
Claim: Android fragmentation is manageable with concrete tactics rather than promises. Shows concrete techniques: layout folders and resource qualifiers to… | ||
| Linear Logic Programming | Chris Martens | 39m |
Claims that replacing classical logic with linear logic makes state change and resource usage first-class and declarative and demonstrates it with an… | ||
| Functional Vectors, Maps, and Sets in Julia | Zach Allaun | 34m |
Implements persistent vector map and set in Julia by building a bitmap vector trie and a sparse bitmap hash trie and shows working code in zakalon… | ||
| Continuum: A JS (ES6) VM Written in JS (ES3) | Brandon Benvie | 38m |
A full ES6 VM implemented in ES3 that parses with uses Esprima parsing, compiles the AST to bytecode for a stack-machine interpreter, and implements the… | ||
| Spores: Distributable Functions in Scala | Heather Miller | 44m |
A new Scala pickling framework and a closure discipline called Spores aim to make function shipping practical: pickling uses macro‑based generation and type… | ||
| Building a Multi-Master Distributed Redis in Erlang | Chad DePue | 39m |
A Redis-compatible server called Edis is built in Erlang and presented as a multi-master experiment that actually runs: it uses LevelDB backend by default… | ||
| Learnfun and Playfun: A Nintendo automation system | Tom Murphy Vii | 28m |
A program learns what “winning” means by observing human play and extracting lexicographic orderings from the NES’s 2048 bytes of RAM, producing ~250 orderings… | ||
| Philosophy of Scala macros | Eugene Burmako | 39m |
Explains that def macros in Scala 2.10 actually expand method calls at compile time, powering concrete features like async/await, the f string interpolator and… | ||
| How does text become data? | Catherine Havasi, Rob Speer | 35m |
Shows how raw text becomes usable vectors and facts using concrete tools and numbers: tokenization with nltk, stemming via WordNet, bag‑of‑words + tf-idf… | ||
| Real-World Datomic: An Experience Report | Craig Andera | 41m |
Experience report on using Datomic to index 250 million event datums stored on DynamoDB and served with a transactor that assigns t values and partitioned… | ||
| Software for Programming Cells | Colin Gravill | 37m |
Web-based CAD generates DNA sequences from high-level designs and compiles a molecular consensus algorithm into strands that are actually synthesized, with… | ||
| The History of Women in Technology | Sarah Dutkiewicz | 41m |
Chronicles specific contributions: Ada Byron documents the first algorithm on Babbage’s analytical engine; the ENIAC crew are six original programmers wiring a… | ||
| Chrome Security Secret Sauce | Parisa Tabriz | 41m |
Chrome details concrete defenses: fuzzing with ClusterFuzz on 2,000+ cores to find memory bugs, sandboxing renderer and plugins (native Flash and built‑in PDF… | ||
| Simplifying Asynchronous Code With Scala Async | Philipp Haller | 45m |
A macro library implements async/await macro that transforms regular Scala code into an efficient state‑machine, returning Scala 2.10/2.11 futures and avoiding… | ||
| Building optimising compiler for Dart | Vyacheslav Egorov | 31m |
A new optimizing pipeline for Dart VM actually ships a single IR for both baseline and optimizing tiers, uses inline caches primarily as type‑feedback tables… | ||
| Erlang for Authoritative DNS | Anthony Eden | 41m |
Reimplemented an authoritative DNS backend for DNSimple in Erlang, leveraging the binary bit syntax, pattern matching and OTP processes to build an in-memory… | ||
| Graph Computing at Scale | Matthias Broecheler | 37m |
Claims an open source stack that enables graph computing at scale and ships a distributed graph database Titan with an analytics sibling Faunus and a traversal… | ||
| Visualization Driven Development | Jason Gilman | 30m |
Claim: building small interactive visualizations speeds debugging and design. Uses Clojure/ClojureScript plus basic HTML CSS JavaScript, D3, websockets and a… | ||
| Fast and Dynamic | Maxime Chevalier Boisvert | 36m |
Claim: the performance gap between static and dynamic languages is closing through JIT techniques and smarter analyses. Evidence: hidden classes (maps), inline… | ||
| Tracking Millions of Ganks in Near Real Time | Garrett Eardley | 29m |
League of Legends moves from MySQL blobs to an Riak cluster to serve millions concurrent and terabytes of game data with near‑real‑time reads and writes. The… | ||
| Curing your event processing blues with Rx | Donna Malayeri, Matthew Podwysocki | 38m |
Claims that Rx turns callbacks and timers into composable queries get shown end to end: JavaScript and .NET Rx implementations power a typeahead using… | ||
| zip Code: Unpacking Data Compression | Scott Vokes | 43m |
Covers concrete algorithms (run‑length, delta, Huffman, LZ77/78/LZW/LZSS) and real tools like gzip's DEFLATE and bzip's Burrows‑Wheeler transform, explains… | ||
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