Strange Loop 2017
2017-09-28..2017-09-30
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Measuring and Optimizing Tail Latency | Kathryn McKinley | 52m |
A tool measures thread activity at 1000 cycle granularity with 1% overhead and attributes 99th‑percentile latency to queuing, noise, or real work… | ||
| To Serve The People: Public Interest Technologists | Matt Mitchell | 48m |
Community encryption workshops under the name CryptoHarlem run monthly in Harlem and scale into sustained local demand, while operational security trainings… | ||
| Rebuilding the Cathedral | Nadia Eghbal | 32m |
Claim: maintenance does not scale with usage — from ~200,000 users in 2001 to 20 million users today while two-thirds of popular projects have one or two… | ||
| Addressing the parallelism gap in replicated server systems | Jose Faleiro | 28m |
Claim: backups can match or exceed primary parallelism by replaying logs with explicit dependency information rather than serializing. Method: build a directed… | ||
| Haxl: A Big Hammer for Concurrency | Simon Marlow | 33m |
Claim: Haxl flips the default from sequential to concurrent and gives automatic parallelism by extracting data dependencies and scheduling breadth‑first. It… | ||
| Promise and Pitfalls of Persistent Memory | Rob Dickinson | 43m |
Persistent memory claims real, measurable differences: 3D XPoint ships as SSDs today and DIMMs next year, offering 3 TB per socket capacity with media-level… | ||
| Type Checking Ruby | Jeffrey Foster | 43m |
A library called rdl adds types to Ruby by treating type annotations as runtime method calls and doing static type checking at runtime, so checks run after… | ||
| EoS in Kafka: Listen up, I will only say this once! | Jason Gustafson | 43m |
Kafka 0.11 delivers exactly‑once semantics by combining an idempotent producer (producer ID + sequence numbers) with a transactional protocol: a transaction… | ||
| PyTorch: Fast Differentiable Dynamic Graphs in Python | Soumith Chintala | 36m |
PyTorch claims fast, dynamic computation by combining an automatic-differentiation engine with a mixed Python and C/C++ tensor library that runs on GPUs. It… | ||
| Running Programs In Reverse for Deeper A.I. | Zenna Tavares | 42m |
Claims a compiler, ReverseFlow, that uses parametric inversion plus deep learning to turn a program (e.g., a TensorFlow graph or renderer) into an inverse… | ||
| So You Wanna Go Fast? | Tyler Treat | 38m |
Concrete, measurable takeaways: Go code shows order-of-magnitude differences when you change representations — sorting 100M items via interfaces can take about… | ||
| The design of JavaScript type systems | Dimitris Vardoulakis | 34m |
In the past 10 years, several type systems have been added to JavaScript. In this talk, we will discuss the factors that influenced the design of these type… | ||
| The Truth About Mentoring Minorities | Byron Woodfork | 47m |
Shows evidence not slogans: a paid apprenticeship at Eighth Light that led to hands-on mentoring and introductions up to the CEO, a literature-backed claim… | ||
| A (Not So Gentle) Introduction To Systems Programming In ATS | Aditya Siram | 37m |
A statically typed ML that D compiles to C claims type-safe pointer arithmetic and the same low-level control as C while enforcing safety with linear-logic… | ||
| Aesthetic Engine 2 | Vladimir Mitrovic | 37m |
Aesthetic Engine 2 encodes a concrete alternative interpretation of HTML and renders it as an opinionated, artistic browser-sculpture: it classifies DOM into… | ||
| Experimental Creative Writing with the Vectorized Word | Allison Parrish | 39m |
Uses pre-trained semantic vectors (GloVe, word2vec, fastText) and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary to create continuous embeddings for meaning and sound, applies… | ||
| Angelina Ballerina Learns About Memory Allocation | Allison McMillan | 39m |
An app that generates huge Excel files triggers Heroku request timeouts (>30s) and memory quota exceeded errors; the diagnosis traces to retained versus… | ||
| Monadic Deep Learning | Yang Bo, Xiaolei Wang | 37m |
Claim: DeepLearning.scala 2.0 implements dynamic neural networks by modelling layers as composable monadic computations and exposing an monad-based DSL plus an… | ||
| Antics, drift, and chaos | Lorin Hochstein | 30m |
Large distributed systems drift into failure despite correct code because local fixes, retries, logging, and support subsystems introduce new failure modes… | ||
| Death of the Trusted Internet | Marianne Bellotti | 34m |
USDS attempts to kill the Trusted Internet Connection by replacing physical chokepoints with a cloud-aware architecture that actually moves packets not policy… | ||
| Inside Twitter's Realtime Delivery of Tweets for Enterprise Customers | Lisa White | 41m |
PowerTrack reliably filters hundreds of millions of daily Tweets at thousands per second and delivers customizable subsets to enterprise customers with… | ||
| "It Me": Under the Hood of Web Authentication | Yan Zhu, Garrett Robinson | 40m |
Deep dive into Passport.js, Flask/JWT and real breaches shows what matters: a password check that compares plaintext or uses naive equality leaks secrets via… | ||
| Just-So Stories for AI: Explaining Black-Box Predictions | Sam Ritchie | 42m |
Claims that random forests used inside Stripe Radar are paired with post hoc explanations and a LIME-like pipeline to turn tree predicates into human‑readable… | ||
| Flow - Am I Your Type? | Mark Volkmann | 43m |
Flow is Facebook’s open source static type checker for JavaScript that supports gradual typing, type inference, and integrates with Babel, ESLint, editors, and… | ||
| Narrated Reality | Ross Goodwin | 39m |
Claims a pipeline that actually ships: character‑level LSTM models trained on the Oxford English Dictionary and on COCO captions plus a million+ AskReddit… | ||
| Leveraging DSLs (Almost) for Free | Alvin Cheung | 43m |
A method called verified lifting automatically infers a high‑level spec from code, proves equivalence with a theorem prover, and generates DSL code; a… | ||
| Program synthesis for declarative building design | Drew Wolpert, Andrew Zukoski | 39m |
Claims that program synthesis plus SMT makes parametric building design verifiable and automatable with concrete results: uses SMT solvers (Z3) and SAT/DPLL(T)… | ||
| Running a Massively Parallel Self-Serve Distributed Data System at Scale | Zhenzhong Xu | 42m |
Keystone is Netflix’s cloud-native streaming pipeline that actually processes ~1.3 trillion events/day (over 500 billion generated daily) using Kafka + Flink +… | ||
| The Biological Path Towards Strong AI | Matt Taylor | 43m |
Claims a biologically constrained model (HTM) that implements realistic pyramidal-neuron states — active, predictive (depolarized), and bursting — and three… | ||
| The hows and whys of a distributed SQL database | Alex Robinson | 42m |
Describes a working open-source distributed SQL engine (CockroachDB) that combines ordered range sharding (ranges ≈64–128MB) with per-range replication… | ||
| The Future is Now | Rachel White | 37m |
Claims that cyberpunk is imminent get nailed down with actual artifacts: a cast silicone prop with an LED ring embedded in a silicone hand that lights on a… | ||
| Geo-Replicated Transactions in 1.5RTT | Robert Escriva | 37m |
A system called Consus implements a new commit protocol that claims to commit fully general geo‑replicated transactions in three wide‑area message delays (an… | ||
| Dependent Types in Haskell | Stephanie Weirich | 39m |
Claims that GHC can host useful dependent‑style programming and shows a working library that parses regexes into a compile‑time occurrence map, uses Template… | ||
| Strength in Numbers: Unums and the Quest for Reliable Arithmetic | Ferris Ellis | 38m |
Claim: unums (version 1) replace opaque floats with interval arithmetic that honestly returns ranges rather than pretending exact values. Demo uses the Julia… | ||
| Biomaterials as UI | Ruthie Nachmany | 29m |
Shows concrete results: bioprinting films that make fabric open and close with humidity, mycelium bricks that survive wind heat and rain, mushroom leather and… | ||
| Practical Applications of the Dickerson Pyramid | Nat Welch | 35m |
Concrete checklist for action not theory: the Dickerson Pyramid maps to specific wins—alert noise drops so pages go from ~30% actionable to ~85% actionable… | ||
| Origami Software from Scratch | Robby Kraft | 36m |
A yearlong build starts from the claim that crease patterns are planar graphs and becomes runnable JavaScript/TypeScript tooling on origami.pw The stack… | ||
| "Flutter: How we're building a UI framework for tomorrow at Google" | Eric Seidel | 32m |
A new UI toolkit called Flutter paints every pixel, handles every gesture, and ships to iOS and Android by compiling Dart straight to ARM while using Skia for… | ||
| Designing 1000 genomes in a single bound: The Codon DSL | Aaron Kimball, Theron Rabe | 39m |
Zymergen claims a production DSL that compiles combinatorial genome designs into factory instructions, using a Scala Codon DSL front end, a Python-backed… | ||
| Stop Rate Limiting! Capacity Management Done Right | Jon Moore | 42m |
Argument: rate limits mislead because throughput, latency and concurrency are different variables; using Little's Law the talk shows concrete failure modes… | ||
| Towards new deep learning abstractions on top of exist frameworks | Tristan Webb | 32m |
Nervana Graph (ngraph) is a Python IR plus frontends and compiler backends that claim to let frameworks target CPUs, GPUs and Intel Crest without rewriting… | ||
| Empowering the next billion with OSTree, Flatpak, NDN, and the cloud | Srdjan Grubor | 46m |
Claims that half the world lacks Internet and average global income is ~$15,000 lead to concrete tactics: OSTree as git for whole filesystem provides atomic OS… | ||
| Predictive Load-Balancing: Unfair but Faster & more Robust | Steve Gury | 42m |
Predictive load balancing claims to cut tail latency by treating per-request elapsed time as offered load and using a streaming median over a moving window to… | ||
| Incident insights from NASA, NTSB, and the CDC | Emil Stolarsky | 36m |
A cross‑industry survey names concrete practices: the NTSB catalogs ~140,000 transport incidents; a 2014 IP routing bug knocks out 9‑1‑1 across seven states… | ||
| Onyx-Native, Information Flow Models and Scientific computing | George Kierstein | 45m |
Onyx-Native is a library that injects stateful, native-code–backed Java objects into an Onyx Platform workflow so polyglot legacy pipelines become declarative… | ||
| Code Generating a Safer Web with Rocket | Sergio Benitez | 42m |
Rocket is a Rust web framework that uses procedural macros to generate compile‑time parsing, validation, and deserialization so there is no runtime… | ||
| The Lux Programming Language | Eduardo Julian | 40m |
A new Lisp named Lux is a purely functional, mandatory statically typed language with type inference that already runs on the JVM and Android (v0.5) and plans… | ||
| Particle physics, 10,000 times faster | Jim Pivarski | 30m |
Claim: nested-event queries compile into columnar array operations and run orders of magnitude faster. Implementation uses SparkSQL Impala Kudu ROOT Parquet… | ||
| Building switches like servers: the strange world of overlapping networking | Sonja Keserovic | 34m |
Built custom switch hardware and separate software stack, running a standard CentOS image and treating the forwarding processes as services (thrift RPC) so… | ||
| How to Hack a Painting | Tyler Hobbs | 45m |
Details matter: a concrete generative model simulates watercolor with the Processing framework and Clojure (Quil), deforming polygon edges by three variables… | ||
| The Security of Classic Game Consoles | Kevin Shekleton | 35m |
Describes concrete mechanisms and breaches: the NES uses a 10NES lock/key chip (snipping pin 4 or cloning the rabbit chip defeats it); Sega Saturn hides a… | ||
| The Performance Engineer's Guide To Java HotSpot | Monica Beckwith | 55m |
Detailed checklist of outcomes and knobs: which HotSpot GCs actually compact incrementally (G1 does region‑based mixed collections), which reduce pauses by… | ||
| Scaling Validation and Quality of Streaming Data Products at Twitter | Kelly Kaoudis | 33m |
Claims concrete results: QE at Twitter builds a staging environment mirroring prod with fake clients and runs end-to-end stress tests, measures pipeline data… | ||
| Scaling with Apache Spark (or a lesson in unintended consequences) | Holden Karau | 40m |
Examines Apache Spark’s scaling tradeoffs with concrete examples: RDD pipelining and laziness speed things up but produce 400‑line stack traces and late… | ||
| Key to the City: Writing Code to Induce Social Change | Jurnell Cockhren | 26m |
Claim: instances of inequality become verifiable decision problems — income disparity maps to a computationally checkable condition and can be tested quickly… | ||
| Lazy Defenses: Using Scaled TTLs to Keep Your Cache Correct | Bonnie Eisenman | 38m |
Describes a concrete system: uses Twitter memcache plus an in‑process hot‑key cache with 30s TTL for spikes, scaled TTLs that start at 2 minutes and ramp to… | ||
| Step by Step - Algorithms that teach you math! | Evy Kassirer | 35m |
Open-source mathsteps is a JavaScript library that parses ASCII math into a parse tree, flattens associative operators to make combining like terms easy, and… | ||
| Artificial Intelligence for Victims of Domestic Violence | Brian Davis | 42m |
A live project called jael.ai claims a cloud‑based SMS and messaging chatbot that uses natural language processing, an intent engine, machine learning, curated… | ||
| Adventures in the vBuffer | Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo | 40m |
Builds a V-buffer renderer that diffs attribute buffers and files away WebGL boilerplate, then profiles it: initial version with lodash isEqual runs smoothly… | ||
| How to *be* a Compiler | Mariko Kosaka | 38m |
Shows how to compile 3 lines of Design by Numbers into a hand drawing by implementing concrete steps: a JavaScript lexer that tokenize → parse → transform →… | ||
| How to Play with Deep Space Data | Lisa Ballard | 34m |
Searchable archives and concrete tools matter: a combined outer-planet search OPUS API returns JSON and exposes about 1.2 million records, including half a… | ||
| Riot Messaging Service - Message Players Like a Pro | Michal Ptaszek | 39m |
Riot Messaging Service is a stateful WebSocket router built in Erlang that moves JSON or binary payloads from backend services to players using REST for… | ||
| Tuning Elasticsearch for English-Language Precision | Erin McKean | 36m |
Shows how a real dictionary index of about a million entries is made findable with Elasticsearch 5.5 by building and testing concrete pipelines: preprocessed… | ||
| The Holy Grail of Systems Analysis: from What to Where to Why | Daniel Spoonhower | 34m |
Claims that distributed latency usually comes from throughput-driven contention and queueing, illustrated with Google Dapper’s limits and a demo built on… | ||
| Policy as Code with Sentinel Language | Armon Dadgar | 41m |
HashiCorp ships a new Sentinel language that codifies compliance rules, a Go-friendly runtime that embeds in tools, a simulator for local testing, and an… | ||
| Bootstrapping the Web with Scala Native | Richard Whaling | 41m |
Builds a Scala Native CGI app, packages it with multistage Docker builds, and scores concrete performance: simple CGI averages ~40 ms under light load, 99th… | ||
| Level Up Your Concurrency Skills With Rust | David Sullins | 39m |
Claim: Rust’s ownership and compile‑time checks eliminate a whole class of concurrency bugs — data races impossible — by enforcing ownership and lifetimes and… | ||
| GPGPU Programming with Metal | Janie Clayton | 29m |
Apple introduces Metal in 2014 and enables true GPGPU on iPhone; the compute path uses kernel functions written in the Metal Shading Language, dispatched as… | ||
| Zuul's Journey to Non-Blocking | Arthur Gonigberg | 36m |
Zuul is rebuilt from blocking Tomcat to a Netty event loop with RxJava filters; benchmarks show ~73,000 rps but production yields only ~10–20% throughput gain… | ||
| Tackling Concurrency Bugs with TLA+ | Hillel Wayne | 30m |
Specifies a bank transfer system with math not code, models it in TLA+ (PlusCal for authoring) and runs the TLC checker from the TLA+ Toolbox to exhaustively… | ||
| Keeping Time in Real Systems | Kavya Joshi | 39m |
Covers concrete tradeoffs: physical clocks drift and UTC inserts leap second repeat that breaks monotonic timestamps, NTP synchronization is slow NTP ≈100ms… | ||
| Why We Built Our Own Distributed Column Store | Sam Stokes | 43m |
A custom datastore called Retriever implements a disk‑based distributed column store inspired by Scuba, ingesting events from Kafka and serving sub‑second… | ||
| Automating Cloud Security and Incident Response (DevSecOps) | Jearvon Dharrie | 33m |
Argues that automation is a requirement not a feature and shows concrete work: uses terraform modules for consistent, auditable infrastructure-as-code, pipes… | ||
| Datafun: a functional query language | Michael Arntzenius | 43m |
Datafun claims a minimal bridge between functional languages and database queries by adding set comprehensions and explicit fixpoints to a pure total language… | ||
| Kotlin: Uncovered | Victoria Gonda | 34m |
Demos show how Kotlin compiles to JVM bytecode and how that decompiles back into concrete Java: decompile Kotlin bytecode into Java via IntelliJ/Android Studio… | ||
| Wait, it does ??tahW: How supporting Right-to-Left can expose your bad UX | Moriel Schottlender | 39m |
Supporting Right-to-Left reveals concrete failures: Wikipedia runs 285 content and 424 interface languages (~120,000 combinations) and confronting RTL surfaces… | ||
| Alice's Adventures in Artificial Intelligence-land | Coraline Ada Ehmke | 37m |
A working Slack bot called Alice actually exists: about 10,000 lines of Ruby behind a single Sinatra route, hooked to Slack via bossy, storing user facts in… | ||
| Observability for Emerging Infra: What Got You Here Won't Get You There | Charity Majors | 39m |
Argues that LAMP-era metrics fail for modern, chaotic systems and claims observability needs raw, contextual events not aggregated numbers; says average API… | ||
| Redux: Architecting and scaling a new web app at The NY Times | Juan Carlos Montemayor Elosua | 41m |
NYT Watching uses Redux to manage complex relationships and hits more than a million users per month within a year. The codebase keeps views pure via… | ||
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