Strange Loop 2021
2021-09-30..2021-10-02
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]
who it's for
software developers, programming language researchers, functional programmers, distributed systems engineers, Rust developers, data engineers, machine learning engineers
topics
type-state APIs in Rust; Rust systems rewriting; event-sourced distributed architectures; stack graphs code navigation; serverless compute acceleration; composable CRDTs for collaboration; JSON-to-graph storage; ML-style relational query language; deep reinforcement learning agents; Rust video streaming with Pravega; distributed tracing for CI; carbon-aware software engineering
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Game Development in Eight Bits | Kevin Zurawel | 40m |
Describes concrete NES constraints—1.79 MHz 6502, 2 KB system RAM, 2 KB VRAM, 8 KB graphics, 32 KB cartridge code—and the hacks that make games work: 8×8 tile… | ||
| Type-Driven API Design in Rust | Will Crichton | 41m |
Live-coding builds a working Rust progress-bar API that compiles and runs, not just slides: it reimplements a tqdm-like wrapper, uses extension traits to add… | ||
| Outperforming Imperative with Pure Functional Languages | Richard Feldman | 35m |
A new language called rock compiles pure functional code to binaries with LLVM, unboxed values and static reference counting and uses opportunistic in-place… | ||
| Whoops! I Rewrote it in Rust | Brian Martin | 34m |
Rewrites Pelikan pieces in Rust, starting with a tokio/mio networking prototype and boringssl TLS, then replaces the C storage by implementing a… | ||
| Functional distributed systems beyond request/response | Melinda Lu | 35m |
Argues that replacing request/response with event-driven, append-only logs yields composable resilient services instead of fragile synchronous webs; shows… | ||
| Nim Nuggets: Systems Programming & Metaprogramming Magic | Aditya Siram | 42m |
Fast compiler bootstraps from C in about 6 minutes and the Nim LSP builds from scratch in ~1 minute, enabling very quick feedback. The talk shows true… | ||
| Morel, a functional query language | Julian Hyde | 41m |
Morel implements Standard ML on the JVM with language extensions that make relations first-class, compiles ML-style programs to relational algebra, and hands… | ||
| Asami: Turn your JSON into a Graph in 2 Lines | Paula Gearon | 43m |
Asami claims it can load JSON in 2 Clojure lines and produce a queryable graph with schema-less RDF-like flexibility. Implementation details include a JVM and… | ||
| Strange Dreams of Stranger Loops | William E. Byrd | 52m |
Relational programming with miniKanren actually synthesizes quines and twines: a two-place evalo relational evaluator yields expressions that evaluate to… | ||
| Incremental, zero-config Code Nav using stack graphs | Douglas A. Creager | 46m |
Claims an incremental, zero‑config code navigation system that runs at GitHub scale by generating per‑file stack graphs, extracting and storing partial paths… | ||
| How we used serverless to speed up our servers | Jessica Kerr, Ian Wilkes | 36m |
Honeycomb uses AWS Lambda as a serverless-as-accelerator for Retriever to scale CPU on demand, cutting query latency by roughly an order of magnitude; median… | ||
| Waterpark: Distributed Actors vs the Pandemic | Bryan Hunter | 39m |
A concrete build story: a custom platform called Waterpark runs on ErlangVM and Elixir across four data centers for HCA’s 185 hospitals and ~2,000 clinics… | ||
| Program Synthesis: A Dream Realized? | Roopsha Samanta | 38m |
Claims a semantics-guided pipeline that augments user examples with relational properties and feeds them to existing inductive synthesizers; implements a… | ||
| Streaming video analysis in Rust using Pravega | Tom Kaitchuck | 34m |
Case study of a scalable real‑time video analysis pipeline written in Rust using GStreamer for frame processing and Pravega for atomic, low‑latency streaming… | ||
| Making Webapps Collaborative with Composable CRDTs | Matthew Weidner, Heather Miller | 34m |
Claims a practical path to turn single‑page webapps into collaborative apps by swapping native types for collaborative CRDT types using the Compoventuals… | ||
| Training an Autonomous Pentester with Deep RL | Shane Caldwell | 35m |
A prototype autonomous pentester uses deep reinforcement learning to pilot Metasploit via a custom environment called Metasploit Gym and trains a DQN agent… | ||
| Dancing With Myself | Mariel Pettee | 36m |
Concrete claim: models trained on personal motion capture actually generate realistic, style-specific choreography and useful variations. Tools and data: a VAE… | ||
| Exploring deep space and deep ocean with AI guidance | Daniel Van Hoesen | 40m |
Describes concrete systems and results: uses Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) and Raman for in‑situ composition, develops on‑board ML encoders to… | ||
| Janus: Easy Complex UI with Declarative FRP | Issa Tseng | 45m |
Janus claims a declarative FRP-style UI with concrete primitives like Varying, List, Map and a composable View/Template system written as ~3,500 lines of… | ||
| Practical Quantum Computing Today | Alex Condello | 39m |
Cloud access via D-Wave’s Leap and the Ocean open source python tools lets programmers submit binary and discrete quadratic models to a 5,000‑qubit annealer… | ||
| Authorship Environments: In search of the “personal” in personal computing | Eric Gade | 39m |
Argues computing needs a literacy shift not a productivity metaphor and claims a medium that lets people peel back layers yields genuine personal authorship… | ||
| Near-Realtime Monitoring of Drones at Sea | Todd Bealmear | 34m |
Saildrone builds a near‑real‑time monitoring system called Sonar that runs on TypeScript/Node.js with Redis hot cache, Postgres, AWS SQS, Kubernetes and… | ||
| Poems in an accidental language | Kate Compton | 53m |
Made as a class assignment in 2013 and graded 110%, Tracery is a tiny JSON context‑free grammar engine shipped as a compact JavaScript library, open sourced… | ||
| Carbon Footprint–Aware Software Development | Tejas Chopra | 34m |
Presents measurements of software energy and carbon impact using Linux tools (perf, Flame Graphs, powertop) and an example SQLite drop-table benchmark showing… | ||
| Tech When the Sky is Falling: Tools for Crisis Response | Emma Ferguson, Colin Schimmelfing | 35m |
MaskMatch launches in about 48 hours to route surplus masks directly to clinicians and scales from a Squarespace form and Google Sheets to Postgres backed… | ||
| Artisanal, machine-generated API libraries | Richard Marmorstein | 30m |
Stripe replaces eight years of hand‑maintained SDKs by generating libraries in seven programming languages using a TypeScript tool called api code gen that… | ||
| Branchstack: branching infra for better development | Patrick Flor, Alex Pearson | 42m |
Claims that making state branchable Postgres and surrounding services as easy as git checkout speeds onboarding, enables realistic testing against Stripe… | ||
| How Tracing Uncovers Half-truths in Slack’s CI Infrastructure | Frank Chen | 23m |
Claims a concrete outcome: using SlackTrace and SpanEvents plus Honeycomb, Kafka and Presto to instrument CI uncovers root causes and drives fixes. Shows… | ||
| Crowd dynamics, RL and Unity: A Journey | Tomas Diaz | 35m |
Claims that reinforcement learning with a Kalman‑based reward produces usable crowd agents, implemented with PPO in Unity-ML-Agents (PyTorch) and deployed via… | ||
| Why security is the biggest benefit of using the Cloud | AJ Yawn | 43m |
Argues that the biggest cloud benefit is measurable security: native services let teams cut mean time to respond by automating detection and fixes… | ||
| Remote Workstations for Discerning Artists | Michelle Brenner | 39m |
Netflix builds cloud remote workstations — Netflix Workstations — using Spinnaker, Packer, Salt, EC2, DynamoDB, SQS and a Go agent to give artists one‑click… | ||
| Prevent Phishing & Impersonation | Karissa McKelvey | 39m |
A concrete claim: a relationship based identity model replaces global profiles with a local-first address book that uses one-time numeric codes to derive a… | ||
| The Future of Conferences | Cristina (Crista) Lopes | 50m |
History of conferences, quantified carbon costs, and a concrete experiment in virtual events converge into clear specifics: an estimate of 330 tons of CO2 for… | ||
| Client Side Deep Learning Optimization with PyTorch | Tyler Kirby, Shane Caldwell | 35m |
Shows how PyTorch models get off the server and run on phones: serialize with torch.jit.script into .pt (libtorch C++), call model.eval, warm up and cache, and… | ||
| How Flutter Can Change the Future of Urban Communities | Edward Thornton | 20m |
Claims a concrete app called Loop that highlights incidents on a map and that posted three times creates a visible loop around trouble spots, used during… | ||
| Pictures Of You, Pictures Of Me, Crypto Steganography | Sean Marcia | 32m |
Friend sends Buffy Babylon 5 and Firefly images that actually carry hidden text, decoded by extracting the least significant bit (and sometimes the two least… | ||
| How to Equitably Close the CS Education Gap | Jeffery Phipps | 34m |
TEALS is a Microsoft Philanthropies program that places industry volunteers into classrooms to train teachers on curricula (Code.org, Project Lead The Way, AP… | ||
| Creating More Inclusive Tech Spaces: Paths Forward | Amy Wallhermfechtel | 41m |
Argues that numbers alone fail—representation rises while power stays concentrated, as Amazon’s workforce data shows—and urges measurement of equity through… | ||
| Impacting Global Policy by Understanding Litter Data | Sean Doherty | 39m |
Data-backed claims, not slogans: a dataset of about 15 million images from 185 countries feeds computer vision and ML that labels object, material and brand… | ||
| Injecting Security at the Cloud Edge | Susan Hinrichs | 34m |
Claims a workable Secure Edge that injects mutual TLS to move legacy services into hybrid and multi‑cloud with minimal app rewrites, using Apache Traffic… | ||
| Keeping Your Open Source Project Accessible to All | Treva Williams | 23m |
Argues that concrete steps — not vague goodwill — increase contributions: use a measurable baseline (GitHub survey numbers showing roughly 95% male, 3% female… | ||
| Software for Court Appointed Special Advocates | Linda Goldstein | 40m |
Born in 2019, rubyforgood/casa now serves hundreds of CASA volunteers across multiple orgs (there are 938 in the USA) with four active leads and weekly… | ||
| Equitable Experiential Access: Audio Description | Laurel Lawson | 39m |
Argues for aesthetic equity not retrofit accessibility and shows a working open source platform Audimance that delivers multiple synchronized audio… | ||
| nothing matches | ||