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A few of my favorite tech talks by women

A very happy Ada Lovelace day to you all! In honor of the day I thought I would post a few of my favorite tech talks given by women. Sarah Allen – Teaching Code Literacy When I first invited Sarah to speak at Strange Loop 2011 about her efforts at creating a tool for teaching programming (Pie), I had doubts whether it would be a topic that would draw interest at Strange Loop. I don’t get... [Read more]

Do we even want Jigsaw?

Recently it was announced that the Java modularity Project Jigsaw would be pushed out of Java 8. Jigsaw and its older brethren JSR 294 and JSR 277 have a tortured history from years of fighting during Java 7. That fighting is not just internally on political and design issues but externally vs other modularity systems, namely OSGi. InfoQ has a decent round-up of opinions on the matter. They say: Good... [Read more]

FP Conference Update

A few days ago I posted a poll about interest in a functional programming conference. I wanted to share some of the data and my intentions. I have had a total of 313 responses to the survey (as of now) – if you still want to respond please do! [Update: now updated with info from 349 responses.] Language Interest The language question allowed multi-select, so below are the percentage of respondents... [Read more]

How about a functional programming conference?

I’ve been kicking around an idea for a US-based conference (probably changing cities each year) for working (or aspiring) functional programmers. I am aware of events like CUFP, but I am thinking of something larger, US-based, and more practical in focus. I am also interested in the idea of mixing the following conference styles: Sessions – traditional speaker-focused sessions Workshops... [Read more]

The Boy Scouts are wrong

Normally I write technical stuff on this blog, but I feel a need to talk about this publicly. As you may be aware, the Boy Scouts have long had a policy disallowing openly gay den leaders or youth. One high profile case of a mother being removed from boy scout leadership is discussed here on a petition for her reinstatement.  The scouts have been reviewing this policy and today reaffirmed their existing... [Read more]

Conference Expectations from Speakers

I read Paul Irish’s “Open Conference Expectations” for speakers with great interest.  I don’t know Paul (other than by reputation) but I organize the Strange Loop and Clojure/West conferences.  While I typically cover the bulk of the items mentioned for speakers in the conferences I run, to me many of these are not something that I would include as a base expectation. The... [Read more]

Powered by people

As I make the end-of-year rounds this weekend for several organizations I belong to with kids and family, I am again struck by how at the heart of every functioning organization are a small core of incredibly dedicated people. My heartfelt thanks go out to these people that power the various important parts of my life and my kids’ lives. At the bottom of it all, you find someone that gives... [Read more]

Clojure values

About a week ago I put up a poll asked questions about what people in the Clojure community valued. In particular, this was a series of questions that said, “We value X over Y”. I was trying to capture the same notion from the agile manifesto where they say that while there is value in the thing on the right, we value the thing on the left more. By the way fellow Clojure enthusiast:... [Read more]