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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Lots of new resources coming in to promote a St. Louis startup scene. Tying together some threads: Arch Grants is a new program to give $50k grants to create startups in St. Louis! Cool program. Here’s a story about it. Startup Weekend is coming to St. Louis this weekend (Jan 27-29th) – it’s a great [...]

Some musings on previous Strange Loop years and the plan for 2012. Strange Loop 2009 I started Strange Loop in 2009 with the thought that I could put together a local conference and surely I could find (heck probably knew myself) a couple hundred people in St. Louis that would go to a one day [...]

I read @codahale’s “leaked” assessment of Yammer moving some code from Scala back to Java with great interest today. I post about it somewhat hesitantly because it is a private thing that became public but I have lots of thoughts and I need to dump them somewhere. I am going to write this quickly and [...]

I had a great time at Devoxx this week – many thanks to Stephan and crew and whoever is making all this delicious beer here in Belgium. During the end of my Cracking Clojure talk I showed a screencast I did where I progressively build up a solution to Conway’s Life in Clojure. The end [...]

There was an interesting conversation today on #clojure about various aspects of Clojure documentation. This is not a new topic I thought I’d goose it a little more publicly. There are docs in several places (this is incomplete, but most easily found): clojure.org – “official”, first-stop, very small editor set dev.clojure Confluence – wiki, editable [...]

I’ve been working on understanding thoroughly how RDF datasets used in SPARQL 1.1 are defined and how named graphs and GRAPH graph patterns are evaluated. I have based this write-up solely on the SPARQL 1.1 specification (mostly section 13) and intentionally not on how existing SPARQL engines or stores actually work. Datasets When evaluating a [...]

I taught the second week in my Processing class for kids this week. Last week we focused on learning the x-y coordinate system, drawing simple shapes (ellipse, rectangles, triangles) and colors. This week I wanted to cover the basics for how users can interact with Processing. We started with a simple circle and I talked [...]