Sessions at Strange Loop 2011 with notes in Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark

Sunday 18th September 2011

• Machine Learning

  by Hilary Mason

  • Machine Learning

  At 11:30am to 2:30pm, Sunday 18th September

  In Gateway 3, Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark

  Coverage note

Monday 19th September 2011

• Storm: Twitter's scalable realtime computation system

  by Nathan Marz

  Storm makes it easy to write and scale complex realtime computations on a cluster of computers, doing for realtime processing what Hadoop did for batch processing. Storm guarantees that every message will be processed. And it’s fast — you can process millions of messages per second with a small cluster. Best of all, you can write Storm topologies using any programming language.

  Storm has a wide range of use cases. The basic use case is “stream processing”: processing a stream of new data and updating databases in realtime. Unlike the standard approach of doing stream processing with queues and workers, Storm is fault-tolerant and scalable.

  Another use case is “continuous computation”: streaming the results of a query to clients to visualize in realtime. An example is streaming trending topics on Twitter into browsers.

  A third use case is “distributed RPC”: computing an intense query on the fly in parallel. With distributed RPC, a Storm topology is a distributed function that you can invoke like a normal function.

  In this talk, I’ll release Storm as open-source. I’ll show how Storm’s simple programming model makes realtime computation easy, robust, and even fun.

  • Big Data
  • NoSQL
  • Real Time
  • Twitter

  At 10:30am to 11:20am, Monday 19th September

  In Grand Ballroom, Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark

  Coverage slide deck note

• Bitcoin: Giving Money an Upgrade

  Financial innovation is no longer off-limits to the common developer! Bitcoin is by far the most successful attempt at a decentralized digital commodity/currency to date. With all the buzz about bitcoin recently (Forbes, NPR, SmartMoney, etc), it’s easy to talk about what bitcoin “should” or “shouldn’t” be, but us geeks really want to focus on what bitcoin actually is, and also what it is not. What long standing problems has bitcoin potentially solved? How is it designed to withstand the test of time and (hacker) talent? How does it work?

  Bitcoin is literally giving the traditional financial sector a “run for its money,” providing a solid foundation for nearly endless innovation. In this presentation we will dive into the elegant architecture behind bitcoin along with some of the economic elements that keep it ticking.

  • Bitcoin
  • Cryptography

  At 3:30pm to 4:20pm, Monday 19th September

  In Gateway 1, Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark

  Coverage note

Tuesday 20th September 2011

• Languages Panel

  by Andrei Alexandrescu, Erik Meijer, Allen Wirfs-Brock, Gerald Sussman, Rich Hickey, Dean Wampler and Joe Pamer

  Dean Wampler will moderate this panel of pre-eminent language designers with questions from the audience.

  • Programming Languages

  At 12:30pm to 1:15pm, Tuesday 20th September

  In Grand Ballroom, Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark

  Coverage note video

• Simple Made Easy

  by Rich Hickey

  Simple has a core meaning, an understanding of which is critical to developing robust and flexible software. We should be simplifying the problem domain, and creating solutions by composing simple parts. Instead, we endure complexity, and pride ourselves in our ability to manage it. We can do better. This talk will discuss simplicity, why it is important, how to achieve it in your designs and how to recognize its absence in the tools, language constructs and libraries we use.

  • Simplicity

  At 4:10pm to 5:10pm, Tuesday 20th September

  In Grand Ballroom, Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark

  Coverage video note link sketch note link