The Final Strange Loop

Strange Loop Day 2 Experiences

The final day of the final Strange Loop dawned bright and sunny over Union Station in this photo from Kyle Adams.

We took a team photo by the iconic stainglass window in Union Station. Jeremy Neal had to leave early to avoid getting stuck by Tropical Storm Ophelia travel delays while headed back to the East coast. So we modified the photo to include him in spirit.

Top Row left to right: Jessie Puls, Cory Mathis, Jeremy Neal, Ross Brandes, Chris Caragianis, Josh Justice Bottom Row left to right: Kyle Adams, Matthew O’Donnell, Jessica Campbell

Incidentally, this stainglass window is in an arch with acoustic superpowers.

Strange Loop Day 2 Talks

So much goodness

By noon there were already minds blown, per Kyle Adams.

It’s lunch time and this is what I’ve learned so far:

• 🤯 Mind blown by Holly Wu’s presentation on type checking and FP constructs in plain vanilla JS.
• 📉 Literally giggled at computational physics as Sam Richie helped us visualize—in the browser!—the path a particle would take inside a torus
• 🐦 Now I’m on my way to a talk about expressing bird song as code, by Chris Ford

An Approach to Computing and Sustainability Inspired from Permaculture

Josh Justice had a few realizations during Devine Lu Linvega’s talk.

There are multiple benefits of programming against a custom VM:

• portability (targeting multiple systems now)
• abstraction (programming at a higher level)
• preservation (minimizing effort to get it working on future systems).

This resonates with how I’ve approached Riverbed.

Josh expanded these thoughts into a blog post on creating your own virtual machine for fun and profit.

A Long Strange Loop

On the last day of the last Strange Loop, Alex Miller shares a history, summarized in this Threads gist from Kyle Adams

A history of the Strange Loop conference…

• Strange Loop is a “third place”: not where you live, not where you work, but where you go for fun
• Picked venues with history and beauty: Tivoli Theatre, Union Station, Stifel Theatre, City Museum
• From beginning, goal was to mix people from industry with folks from academia, with a dash of humanities (non-obvious directions for technology)

Non-obvious learnings from past attendee feedback

• There is no “best talk”; it’s so subjective and different for everyone
• Multi-track = Choose Your Own Adventure
• 99% of the time someone doesn’t like a talk because it doesn’t match the expectations set by the title or abstract; people can be very forgiving of tech issues if you match your title/abstract

2013: Thrown for a Loop: A Carnival of Consciousness David Stutz, composer, mathematician, put together a performance with brass band, aerialist, Closure… all around the themes of Douglas Hofstadter’s I am a Strange Loop book. Peak Strange Loop.

History of attendance

• Attendance peaked in 2018. 2019 was not much of a drop off, but that was the difference between making and not making money
• No conference in 2020—nice breather
• 2021 was small; lots of cancellations
• 2022: attendance was still low because no travel budgets, but tons of people hiring/sponsoring
• 2023: back then to pre-pandemic levels

Contracts signed three years out, so 2020 contract signed in 2017.

That 3 year lead time on fixed cost contracts means there’s a lot of time for something to go wrong that destroys the conference. Lots of risk.

Future of conferences

• Can’t ignore climate costs of doing something like this
• What makes a good conference: context, content, and people
• Lose two of those with virtual conferences, so that’s not great
• Is there something between in-person and virtual? Meetups, regional conferences, multiple connected conferences …

On Letting Things End

• ✅ Achieved every goal of original purpose and beyond
• 🚫 Gotten harder and riskier to these on; close brushes with bankruptcy
• ♾️ Something like Strange Loop should be free to take on the personality of their organizers; no cosplaying Strange Loop
• 🌱 OK to let things end: trees grow up, protect younger trees, die and give birth to new trees—it’s OK.

Alex received a standing ovation at the end. Lots of fond memories and feelings for Strange Loop.

Making Hard Things Easy

Kyle Adams enjoyed this talk by Julia Evans inspired by turning something hard into Wizard Zines, and shared this gist on Threads:

Intro Julie makes me happy. She’s passionate and then she’s able to explain her passions in ways that make you excited about them too!

• Sometimes simple things take a long time to learn and that is frustrating.
• Sometimes my friends struggle with the same problems.
• Everyone has the same set of problems… over and over again.

Got so mad about this that she started wizard zines.

Looking at four examples of this:

1. Bash
2. HTTP
3. SQL
4. DNS

Bash

• Most programs stop working when there’s an error; not Bash (need ‘set -e’)
• Cool, now we’re good right? Nope. ‘||’ disables ‘set -e’ within the function
• Why’s it so hard? We tend not to use bash all that often; write a script every few years and then set it to one side
• There’s a big community of people using bash successfully, so it IS possible
• Gotta know a giant pile of trivia to do it; who’s good at remembering a giant pile of trivia? COMPUTERS!
• shellcheck remembers the trivia for you, so yay!

TRICK share what tools you’re using to reduce cognitive load

TRICK warn people about gotchas and the bad things computers have done to you

Good to know what the stories are behind the pain: how has the computer hurt you?

HTTP

• Browsers: 21 million lines of code, 30 years of history, lots to understand. Maybe that’s why people are confused about HTTP. How do we wrap our heads around all this code?
• Brain not big enough to retain all the info around HTTP stuff like standard headers
• 15 headers, 12 words about each one, 1 example for each TRICK: share your favorite references: css-tricks.com, MDN

SQL

• Program isn’t written in the same order that they’re executed

TRICK Tell the chronological story of what the computer is doing

• Another example: CORS. What’s the back-and-forth happening? Makes the process more concrete
• Very hard to know what our computers are doing. Julia wrote the same blog post, about what happens during running HelloWorld, 10 years apart and the second version has 4288 words (versus 710 words); better understanding now of what happens under the hood
• Great activity with coworkers: ask “how does this thing work?” People in one area understand one part of the process and people in other areas understand other parts

DNS

• What’s hard about DNS?
• Lots of hidden parts: library to make DNS data, cache that you don’t see, conversation between cache and sources of truth
• How are you supposed to develop an intuition about a system when it’s hidden from you? Let’s expose it!
• Wrote own authoritative DNS server to expose those interactions: messwithdns.net Demo: OMG conference attendees are hitting the subdomain she just set up and we’re watching all these DNS requests are rolling in live and it’s so funny!

Another hard thing in DNS

• Tools are confusing.
• Tools for querying the DNS caching are confusing in their output.

TRICK Eraser eyes: what is the really important part of the output that you need to see? Learning how to ignore the rest …

How do we resolve this, moving folks from “confused” to “mostly get it”?

• The tricks above
• Don’t need to have a public presence like Julia
• Help others understand: can be the loud newbie (even if you’re experienced), the bug chronicler, the tool builder, the TIL person, “read the entire internet” and has 700 tabs person, the question answerer, the documentarian, ??? (add your own roles here)

To end
If you’re struggling with something that seems like it should be basic, it’s not just you, other people struggle with it. If we can figure out why it’s hard, then we can fix it.

Drawing Comics at Work

Randall Munroe aka xkcd comic creator gave a keynote on the final day that drew the attention of Kyle Adams who shared this gist on Threads: LOL: Randall just gave a shout-out to Julia Evans because he’s been writing shell scripts for 20+ years and just learned about shellcheck. Yay for sharing tools!

September 2005: Munroe was finishing up physics degree. YouTube had launched and video of news anchor dropping mentos in Diet Coke went viral. Memes! Munroe also had a web site running on a Pentium 1 at his mom’s house. He put his doodles from physics class on the server for buddies.

Got an AIM asking for permission to post his doodles on BoingBoing. Spent next two hours getting his site on to a real host. Kicked off Monroe’s career of web comics.

Got job working at a NASA lab on a robot but traffic to his web site was also growing. Ended up spending a lot of free time packing up merchandising. Around same time, NASA didn’t renew his contract. Aside: found out he could attach an Ethernet cable to the neck of the robot and it would pull him around the building. Passed the execs. Wonder why they didn’t renew? 😉

Started our drawing about what he thought were universal themes: companionship, cats are cute, etc. But also obscure math and programming things. Shocked by how many people had opinions about obscure Linux commands.

xkcd comic 149

Learned Python last week, wrote a comic on it, and then Guido Van Rossum was asking about quibbles Munroe had with the syntax.

xkcd comic 353

Turns out there are SO many things people on the internet are wrong about. Very easy to get sucked down the hole of being righteously indignant at others they don’t know. Nothing as humbling as writing a righteous screed about why someone is wrong… only to have them reply with a link to your own comic.

xkcd comic 386

Imposter syndrome: you feel insecure so you wait for someone else to mess up and then correct them… and they then feel insecure. Vicious cycle that pushes us all away from each other rather than making connections.

Drew comic about a ball pit and then had someone contact him about doing it for real: an unexpected connection.

xkcd comic 150

Another unexpected connection: people writing to him with questions that they deemed too insignificant for “real” scientists. These became his “What if?” posts and book.

Q: From what height would you need to drop a steak for it to be cooked when it hit the ground? -from Alex Lehey, at the time a HS student, now a musician

A: Steak gets seared on one side and raw on the other: Pittsburgh rare.

But that led to other questions: what happens to falling hypersonic steaks? Do they flutter? Munroe put this asterisk in his book as a joke…

…but then someone did an experiment in a hypersonic wind tunnel on a steak.

🥩 Sent Munroe videos of what actually happened.

Turns out that he was qualitatively correct in his calculations but the steak does NOT look appetizing afterward. The PhD students who tried this spent rest of the evening cleaning charred & raw bits of meat off the wind tunnel.

Turns out astronauts/pilots spend a lot of time thinking about what fields/crops they would land in if they had to do an emergency landing.

The thing about asking these questions is that they sound silly. They sound like questions a child would ask: what would happen if you filled the solar system with soup?

Often these questions that sound silly are hard. It’s incredibly rewarding reaching out to others and asking them these questions.

Looking back on things that have gotten him mad: debates on how to treat other people are still important. Debates about technical merits are not: you can write apps in “bad” languages or send stuff over flawed protocols.

What DID matter about the Creative Commons notice was that very nice and earnest people would hound folks who used XKCD stuff without attribution.

Tools are important not because of the design decisions that went into making them but because of how people are using them.

One more thing: don’t look down on people because you think you’re smarter because it can come back to bite you. It is an iron clad reality that people are learning facts all the time. If I make fun of those people then I miss out on the fun of sharing the fact with them and seeing them learn it.

xkcd comic 1053

Strange Loop Day 2 Impressions

Why multidisciplinary conferences are important

Chris Caragianis was reflecting on why people enjoy Strange Loop and hit on a thread.

“The speed of light is 4 meters per clock cycle.”

This line from Mae Milano’s wonderful talk on distributed systems has become one of the quotable quotes of the last Strange Loop.

In my day to day work in the application layer I doubt that I ever have occasion to consider how far light can travel while my computer counts to one. And yet, this is a fundamental fact underpinning what’s possible, what’s hard and what’s easy in computing (particularly but not exclusively in distributed computing).

That’s what’s great about a multidisciplinary conference, especially one as ambitious and creative as Strange Loop. This week has been an opportunity to be immersed in what is exciting, new and audacious from all over the computing landscape.

I’m sure I’ll always make my way to conferences and meetings that center on technologies I’m enmeshed in all the time, but as Strange Loop comes to end I’ll also be looking for places to go where the diversity of thinkers and thoughts is as rich as it is in St Louis this week.

Strange Loop Day 1 Experiences

Ross Brandes, Jessie Puls, Jess Campbell, and Matty O’Donnell (pictured below) checked out Terror Tacos. It’s an all-vegan taco place that played metal and horror movies.

Besides being delicious, it also has a very unique ambiance. Check out the Alien hanging out in the bathroom!

Biggest takeaway from Day One of Strange Loop 2023: the speed of light is too slow.

• Kyle Adams

Strange Loop Day 1 Talks

Why Programming Languages Matter

Josh Justice shared some impressions from Andrew Black’s talk, including learning about stepwise refinement.

Playing with Engineering

AnnMarie Thomas spoke about engineering as a fine art and the concept of playing in engineering, and Kyle Adams had these gist threads to share: “Engineering is a fine art.” Thomas found a niche in intersection of art, engineering, and education. Thomas’ experience in grad school is a great chaser to the previous presentation about building a career: listen to yourself, take the L’s.

“I aspire to not mess up too badly.” If you’re doing new things, how are you going to NOT mess up?!?

What does play in engineering look like? Harmonic oscillation as abstract calculations… or stick your students in a bungie jumper?

Think process not outcome.

Play is process not outcome. Play is joyful. Play involves freedom of choice. Play is social.

Example: a project to involve hard-of-hearing in a music concert via visualizing the music as it’s being sung: colors, shapes, motion.

Example: OK Go Sandbox. Translating OK Go’s music videos into educational materials. Pandemic hits. “All Together Now” song + 2500 people… whoops, 10K people and counting. Then George Floyd happens. Now it’s 5 music videos with 5 different animators. Over 400 music submissions from around the world in all file formats. How do you pull all this together, especially against the backdrop of what’s happening in society? Students did a lot of the work of sorting, organizing, etc.

The magic was: we didn’t have a song, we had a framework, and then everyone collaborated to fill it in.

Play is process not outcome. Play is joyful. Play involves freedom of choice. Play is social.

Parting thoughts

1. Be kind.
2. Play well with others.
3. Clean up your messes.

And the outcome of the music video collaboration …

How to Build a Meaningful Career

Taylor Poindexter and Scott Hanselman’s talk felt supremely uplifting to Jess Campbell, so this is likely one to watch.

Josh Justice felt like the talk was timely from a personal level.

Kyle Adams shared these gist notes on Threads:

1. Give myself some grace. Even the best have rough moments—NYT best-selling authors with empty book signings, etc. I’m going to have e some L’s.
2. It’s the L’s that make us. Sit in it and “steep in the tea you have made.”
3. A career involves luck. Luck = opportunity + being prepared. Can’t control the opportunities as much but I can be prepared through diligent, intentional practice.
4. OK to code just for the money. Maybe taking care of your family is more important than programming and that’s fine. Life is short so do stuff that matters. (“What matters” is highly personal.)
5. (Career) Shift happens. Listen to yourself and respond to what you like.
6. Average career is 40 years, so it’ll include things I can’t anticipate. “As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Embrace the unknowns.
7. Growth happens when I’m stretching—I can bounce off the bottom of the pool—but not drowning. Or: in over my head but amongst my flowers. (Over my head but surrounded by people want me to succeed.)
8. Goals first, plans third. No plan survives contact with the enemy, AKA life.

In summary …

Incidentally … … the mention of the phrase “a series of scrums,” meant like “a series of iterations” got Ross Brandes thinking:

Totally makes sense in a room of engineers/developers/whatever-you-want-to-call-us. But a scrum in rugby is pretty weird (if like most North Americans, you’re not familiar with rugby), with folks from both teams pushing against each other to pass the ball from the ground in the middle of them.

So where did capital-S Scrum come from? Of course Wikipedia has the answer:

They called this the rugby approach, as the process involves a single cross-functional team operating across multiple overlapping phases, in which the team “tries to go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth”.

But who’s the opposing team? Time? 😏

Coffee tips

Conferences can be intense! If you drink coffee regularly, finding a reliable place to grab a cup is often a top priority on day one. Want to recharge later on? Double Agents found some nearby options in the area at:

• Catalyst Coffee Bar on Pine Street
• Anchor Room Coffeehouse on Olive Street

This venue is gorgeous

Wow, the Stifel Theatre at the Union Station Hotel is gorgeous! You can take a virtual tour on the Stifel Theatre website. And here are some photos from Jessica Campbell, Kyle Adams, and Josh Justice showing the theatre space in context of the conference.

Jessica Campbell’s vantage point includes a peek at the detailed work underneath the balcony level, which forms the ceiling for the rear orchestra.

Kyle Adams shared two views of Stifel Theatre’s classical beauty on Threads: the classic proscenium stage and the dome ceiling.

Union Station as a whole is beautiful—Jess Campbell captured details of the arched ceiling, and the pond outside in the area that formed the original trainshed.

Travel day!

Part of the fun (and sometimes hassle) of attending a conference is when anticipation meets the day of arrival, AKA travel day. For Double Agents, it’s also a chance to catch up in-person with folks over dinner. When you’re 100% remote, conferences often feel like mini-retreat meet ups.

Here’s a peek at a few slices of travel day getting to the conference.

St. Louis SC Match

A couple of our Double Agents took in a soccer match at City Park stadium and Jess Campbell snapped these photos. St. Louis Soccer Club met Los Angeles Football Club at home and the game ended in a nil-nil draw.

City Museum

The “weirdly wonderful” City Museum provides fun for all ages and **Kyle Adams checked it out after arriving in St. Louis.

Striking wallpaper

When Kyle Adams arrived at the hotel he was wowed by this floral wallpaper climbing up the stairs in vibrant shades of purple, red, yellow, and orange.

Vintage Mac appreciation

Josh Justice loves vintage Macs, and decided to bring a PowerBook G4 along to the conference. The experiment began by tethering it to his iPhone for the MetroLink ride from the airport. You can follow Josh on Mastodon at @CodingItWrong@bitbang.social for more vintage Mac speicfic goodness.

Strange advice at Strange Loop

This share from Josh Justice over on tdd.social made those of us not attending Strange Loop wonder if St. Louis is preparing for all eventualities, including bears hanging out where tourists congregate.