How to teach programming (and other things)? by Felienne Hermans Strange Loop Conference 2026-09-25 | How to teach programming (and other things)? by Felienne Hermans
The Lemniscate by Ann Johnson, Charles Comstock Strange Loop Conference 2023-09-16 | Lemniscate editor: dgtized.github.io/lemniscate0:00 Intro1:15 Artist Bios3:00 Concept5:30 System Architecture7:08 Browser Kiosk9:48 Microcontroller11:05 Sculpture12:13 Programming Animations for the Sculpture *15:01 Language Basics16:23 Color Modes18:06 Pixel Variables and Constants19:05 Pixel Coordinates Map20:47 Functions23:18 User Variables24:10 Live Programming Demo *28:11 Live Sculpture Response29:00 MIDI History and Info32:10 MIDI Events34:26 Midi Input Details37:15 MIDI Input Live Demo *40:50 Console Logging on the Kiosk41:12 Custom MIDI Instrument Demo43:19 Structure of a MIDI Packet43:45 Design Constraints and Interfaces47:09 Thank You!
There Are No Shortcuts in Organizing, but Technology Sure Does Help by Vicki Crosson, Shane Moore Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-17 | Building solidarity in your workplace is all about creating connections with your coworkers, so they say there are “no shortcuts” to having conversations with each other. This was no less true for the Times Tech Guild; we had literally thousands of one-on-one conversations over three years of organizing. But while there were no shortcuts, having product managers, project managers, data analysts, designers, and engineers sure did help! This talk is about how we used our strengths in data visualization, automation, and website development to give our organizing a boost, and what we learned along the way.Vicki CrossonNYT Tech Guild@viccroVicki Crosson has worked as a software engineer at the New York Times for 6 years. She was on the organizing committee for the Times Tech Guild during its formation, and continues on as a steward and as the secretary of the unit council. She learned everything she knows about unions on the fly and is particularly interested in connecting people with problems that are a good fit for their skills and interests, so that they can be just as excited as she is!Shane MooreNYT Tech GuildShane is a Staff Software Engineer at the New York Times and a Shop Steward in the NYT Tech Guild.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Diagrammar: Simply Make Interactive Diagrams by Pontus Granström (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-16 | Diagrams are crucial for communication and learning in STEM fields. Creating them involves repeated patterns, consistent components, exact positioning, and, ideally, user interaction. A programming language has right the tools to do all of the above, but much of its power is only available to career programmers, gated behind the complexity of things like SVG, CSS, JS, and handling user input.Diagrammar is a tool for creating interactive diagrams, that aims to be much simpler, while retaining the power of a full programming language (Elm). It was designed for making online STEM courses at Brilliant, and we make full use of this power: parametric reusable diagrams, authors sharing toolkits and styles, precise positioning -- and any diagram can be interactive!In this talk, I will give you a quick tour of Diagrammar and its primitives, share ideas for designing simple, learnable tools, and tell you what we've learned from authors creating thousands of diagrams across dozens of courses.Pontus GranströmNamna, Brilliant@pnutusI direct and design interactive courses and tools for STEM at Brilliant. I previously studied music composition and physics, taught university math, and worked on tools and visual effects at Ubisoft. I love learning and teaching, I still dabble in music, and I have a deep interest in thoughtful and unique game design.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Sniffing the Metaverse by Benjamin Cabé (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-16 | Over the last decade, AI has been infused into everyday applications, helping us find the relevant information, tell the difference between a dog and a muffin but smelling things for us is not one of them. An electronic nose can detect lung cancer, help in explosive material detection, industrial level food and resource monitoring and more. How can you train your data to solve your specific problems? How do you make sense of large-scale real-time sensor data? How does Metaverse connect to the physical world through sensors?In this talk we will show you how we solve a big developer problem, how to find the freshest coffee in your office building. Beyond solving our silly first world problem with AI, we will tell you the story of the 13 year old who actually use the sensors to detect fungal pneumonia. Our demo will walk you through the tools that solve bigger problems on larger scales like Machine Learning, Digital Twins(IoT) and Spatial Anchors(Augmented Reality) .Benjamin CabéPrincipal Program Manager, Azure IoT - Microsoft@kartbenBenjamin is a technology enthusiast with a passion for empowering developers to build innovative solutions. A long-time open source advocate, he co-founded the Eclipse IoT Working Group in 2011 and grew from scratch a vibrant open-source community of hundreds of developers and dozens of deeply engaged companies. He is currently working at Microsoft as a Principal Program Manager for Azure IoT, where he is leading developer engagement initiatives with some of the top communities and companies in the embedded, AI, and open hardware space.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Modern B-Tree techniques by Dmitrii Dolgov (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-15 | B-Trees are probably the most important access structures in databases and file systems, and everyone knows basic ideas about how B-Tree work. But after reading a few white papers about this topic it turns out that these "basics" are about 40 years old. Over the years so many techniques were proposed in order to improve efficiency in one cases, add functionality in others or even embrace new types of hardware.Inspired by Goetz Graefes and many other authors, we will go through the most interesting of such techniques, see why they are so cool, what kind of use cases they address and how many of them did land in PostgreSQL or other databases.Dmitrii DolgovPostgreSQL contributor, Software Engineer@erthalionPostgreSQL contributor, Software Engineer-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
The Education of a Civic Technologist by Alex Allain (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-15 | How can we use technology for good ends rather using technology to amplify our own, possibly implicit, preferences? Over the last two years, U.S. Digital Response has served over 200 governments and non-profits on over 300 projects to address the challenges caused by COVID across 38 states and territories. Rather than leading with solutions, we've intentionally chosen to partner closely with the domain experts doing the hard work close to real world problems. This changes how, as technologists, we approach problem solving and technical decision making. In this talk, we'll cover our approach, how we lead with a problem discovery and understanding mindset, pick tools that are suitable for both the job at hand AND the people who must maintain them, and how we translate this learning into creating scalable solutions. This talk is for anyone considering how to make an impact in the civic tech space.Alex AllainCo-founder and CTO, U.S. Digital Response@alexallainAlex oversees the development of technological tools, automation, and infrastructure at USDR. Alex most recently served as a Director of Engineering at Dropbox.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Reviving 1990s Digital Dress-Up Dolls with Smooch by Libby Horacek (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-14 | The Kisekae Set System or KiSS is an open specification for digital dress-up dolls created in 1991 and expanded throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Artists created thousands of KiSS dolls over the twenty years it was in active use. It includes a custom image format, a domain-specific scripting language, and a wide array of viewers and editing tools. In this talk, we'll take a deep dive into how KiSS works and how we can revive this dead format using JavaScript and Haskell.Libby HoracekPosition Development@horrorcheckLibby is a software developer and worker-owner at Position Development. For the past six years, she's maintained several open source Haskell libraries. She started Smooch, a browser-based viewer for KiSS dolls, while attending Recurse Center in 2015.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
KalDB: A cloud native log search platform by Suman Karumuri (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-14 | Slack currently uses Elasticsearch as its primary centralized log search platform. At our scale of one petabyte of logs per week, we face three major issues with our cluster: due to large spikes in volume our logs tend to be delayed, limiting our real-time visibility into our systems; we often fail to ingest logs due to field conflicts; and at 50 clusters Elasticsearch is operationally complex.We built KalDB, a new lucene based cloud-native log store to address the issues we experienced with Elasticsearch. This project prioritizes fresh logs over older during large spikes to maintain real-time visibility, and automatically handles field conflicts by employing a schema on read. The cloud-native aggregator/leaf/tailer architecture enables first-class support for Kubernetes, and employs techniques like S3 backed storage to reduce infrastructure cost and automate operations.Suman KarumuriSr Staff Software Engineer, Slack@mansuSuman Karumuri is a Sr. Staff Software Engineer and the tech lead for Observability at Slack. Suman Karumuri is an expert in distributed tracing and was a tech lead of Zipkin and a co-author of OpenTracing standard, a Linux Foundation project via the CNCF. Previously, Suman Karumuri has spent several years building and operating petabyte scale log search, distributed tracing and metrics systems at Pinterest, Twitter and Amazon. In his spare time, he enjoys board games, hiking and playing with his kids.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
The Evolution of a Planetary-scale Distributed Database by Kevin Scaldeferri (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-13 | When New Relic's in-house telemetry database (NRDB) was first created Docker didn't exist, Kafka was risky bleeding-edge technology, and running a system like it in the public cloud was prohibitively expensive. Today, NRDB is globally distributed, cloud-agnostic, and orchestrated with Kubernetes. We ingest exabytes of data into a swarm of continuously rebalanced clusters while providing a seamless experience to our users, who never have to know about any of the complexity under the hood. This talk will discuss how we got from there to here, the challenges we faced, and how we solved them. You'll walk away with a better understanding of both the theory and practice of building and operating global-scale distributed systems.Kevin ScaldeferriPrincipal Engineer at New RelicKevin Scaldeferri has over 20 years of experience building large scale distributed systems in the search, eCommerce, and observability spaces. He is a passionate supporter of monoids, strong type systems, and the Oxford comma.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Data Driven Investigation in Defense of Human Rights by Christo Buschek (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-12 | Over the last few years, data-driven investigation as a field has gained ground. It has become an essential aspect of journalists' daily work and human rights defenders worldwide. Data-driven investigations are applied for various outcomes, from producing stories covering bias in predictive policing to indicting warlords to the International Criminal Court. Data allows us to develop compelling stories which expose the misuse of power and human rights abuses.In this talk, I would like to talk about the practice of data as an investigative method. Data-driven investigations bring together a wide variety of disciplines and techniques. They combine code, design, and analysis and thus can not only extend previous forms of research but also develop and execute entirely new methodologies. I want to highlight different aspects of data-driven methods and their opportunities for systematic investigations and interdisciplinary collaborations.Christo BuschekIndependent programmer and data journalistChristo Buschek is a programmer and data journalist. His focus lies in data-driven research, which he combines with storytelling to expose human rights abuses and strengthen social justice. Among other projects, Buschek's open-source software, Sugarcube, has been used to preserve the most extensive collection of documentation on war crimes in Syria. Buschek received the Kim Wall Award, the Sigma Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for the project "Built to Last," which documented the mass incarceration of Uighurs in China. Additionally, Buschek is a Knowing Machines Fellow at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at the New York University, studying the biases of datasets that underlie today's AI, and works on an expert level for the CDCPP of the Council of Europe to promote the importance of freedom of artistic expression. In the past, Buschek has also trained non-profit staff and human rights activists in digital security and privacy.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Interactive Debugging and Testing Support for Deep Learning by Tianyi Zhang Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-01 | Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been widely used in NLP tasks. Yet it is challenging to debug RNNs due to their inherent complexity and opaqueness. To address this challenge, we present an interactive debugger that transforms an RNN model, which is complex and unfamiliar to regular developers, back to something they are familiar with----a Finite State Machine (FSM). The FSM provides a bird’s-eye view of the internal decision-making process of the RNN model. As the model reads each word in an input sentence, it will transit between different states until it reaches the end of the sentence. If a developer clicks on a state, they can see the frequent words and phrases associated with this state. In this way, we convert those high-dimensional arrays to symbolic values that are more interpretable to programmers. Given a misclassified text, our debugger will produce a state trace with intermediate decisions made by the RNN model. Similar to how we can step through a program, we can step through the states in the trace to inspect the decision-making process of the model.Tianyi ZhangAssistant Professor in Computer SciencePurdue UniversityPresented at the "It Will Never Work in Theory" miniconf at Strange Loop 2022. neverworkintheory.org/events/strange-loop-2022-09.html-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Finding Bugs in Deep Learning Programs by Foutse Khomh Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-01 | Foutse Khomh is a Full Professor of Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada CIFAR AI Chair on Trustworthy Machine Learning Software Systems at Mila - Quebec AI Institute, and FRQ-IVADO Research Chair on Software Quality Assurance for Machine Learning Applications. His research interests include software maintenance and evolution, machine learning systems engineering, cloud engineering, and dependable and trustworthy ML/AI. Presented at the "It Will Never Work in Theory" miniconf at Strange Loop 2022. neverworkintheory.org/events/strange-loop-2022-09.html-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
How to Recommend Tools for Finding and Fixing Software Errors by Chris Brown Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-01 | Dr. Chris Brown (chbrown13.github.io) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science (https://cs.vt.edu/) at Virginia Tech. His research group (code-world-no-blanket.github.io) aims to improve the behavior, productivity, and decision-making of software engineers. This talk focuses specifically on improving the adoption of useful tools to automated development tasks. Dr. Brown provides an overview of attempted methods to recommend tools for finding and fixing software errors, proposes a framework to design effective recommendations based on nudge theory, and provides takeaways for researchers, tool builders, and developers to overcome "the three unwise monkeys" of tool adoption. The papers and books referenced include: * Brown and Parnin, Sorry to Bother You: Designing Bots for Effective Recommendations (dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/BotSE.2019.00021)* Brown, et al., How Software Users Recommend Tools to Each Other (ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8103460)* Murphy-Hill and Murphy, Peer Interaction Effectively, Yet Infrequently, Enables Programmers to Discover New Tools (dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1958824.1958888)* Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (google.com/books/edition/Nudge/NGA9DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0)* Maier, et al., No evidence for nudging after adjusting for publication bias (pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2200300119)* Brown and Parnin, Sorry to Bother You Again: Developer Recommendation Choice Architectures for Designing Effective Bots (dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3387940.3391506) For more information, please feel free to reach out to Chris (chbrown13.github.io/contact.html) and visit se-participants.github.io to discover more ways to get involved with his research.Chris BrownChris is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. His research aims to improve the behavior, productivity, and decision-making of software engineers.Presented at the "It Will Never Work in Theory" miniconf at Strange Loop 2022. neverworkintheory.org/events/strange-loop-2022-09.html-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
How Automated Tools Can Communicate Effective Strategies for Fixing Bugs by Justin Smith Strange Loop Conference 2022-11-01 | Justin SmithAssistant Professor of Computer ScienceLafayette CollegePresented at the "It Will Never Work in Theory" miniconf at Strange Loop 2022. neverworkintheory.org/events/strange-loop-2022-09.html-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Its Not You, Its the API: Automatically Avoiding API Misuses by Sarah Nadi Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-31 | While software libraries avoid re-inventing the wheel, using their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is not always straight forward. This is especially true when there are implicit undocumented expectations on how to use the API. Building on years of research in the area of API misuse detection, this talks presents a way to create an automated continuous conversation between API designers and API users. By mining lots of examples of how an API is used in practice, API designers get a starting point for authoring usage rules for how they expect developers to use their APIs. These rules are then automatically encoded into checks that client developers can use to ensure they are correctly using the library. Check sarahnadi.org/smr/api-misuse for more details and related tools.Sarah Nadi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta, and a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Software Reuse. She obtained her Master's (2010) and PhD (2014) degrees from the University of Waterloo in Canada. Before joining the University of Alberta in 2016, she spent approximately two years as a post-doctoral researcher at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. Sarah's research provides automated support tools that help software developers accomplish their tasks more efficiently. Her recent work focuses on supporting developers as they use software libraries, including the initial selection process, correctly using the library's API, and potential migration to newer alternative libraries. Sarah leads the Software Maintenance and Reuse (SMR) lab at the University of Alberta. For more information about the work we do at SMR, please visit sarahnadi.org/smr/.Presented at the "It Will Never Work in Theory" miniconf at Strange Loop 2022. neverworkintheory.org/events/strange-loop-2022-09.html-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Choose Wisely: Code Smells in Automatically Generated Code by Joanna Cecilia da Silva Santos Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-31 | AI-based code generation tools (such as GitHub Copilot) can help software engineers save time while developing their code. However, are the code snippets generated by these tools trustworthy? In this talk, I explain some of the security and quality risks of using the code generated by these tools based on our research findings. Study pre-print: s2e-lab.github.io/preprints/scam22-preprint.pdf.Joanna Cecilia da Silva Santos, PhDAssistant Professor Department of Computer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Notre DameJoanna is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Her main research interests are software engineering, software security, and program analysis. Presented at the "It Will Never Work in Theory" miniconf at Strange Loop 2022. neverworkintheory.org/events/strange-loop-2022-09.html-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
One Thousand and One Stories: a Large-scale Survey of Software Refactoring by Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-31 | Mohamed Wiem MkaouerMohamed is an Assistant Professor in Software Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His research interests include software quality, systems refactoring, model-driven engineering, and software testing.Presented at the "It Will Never Work in Theory" miniconf at Strange Loop 2022. neverworkintheory.org/events/strange-loop-2022-09.html-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Its Like Coding in the Dark: the Need for Learning Culture in Engineering Teams - Catherine Hicks Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-31 | Cat is the VP of Research Insights and Director of the Developer Insights Lab at Pluralsight Flow. She holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, was an inaugural Fellow in the UC San Diego Design Lab, and has led research at organizations such as Google and Khan Academy. She serves on the Advisory Council of the University of San Diego Center for Digital Civil Society. Presented at the "It Will Never Work in Theory" miniconf at Strange Loop 2022. neverworkintheory.org/events/strange-loop-2022-09.html-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Machine Learning for Developer Productivity by Satish Chandra (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-30 | The availability of large code corpora has made it possible to build innovative software productivity tools that use machine learning, paving way for capabilities that were not possible with static analysis technology. In this talk, I will provide a quick overview of this area, and include some industry experiences.Satish ChandraSoftware Engineer at Meta, Inc.Satish Chandra is a software engineer at Meta Inc, working in the area of machine learning applied to software engineering.NOTE: Due to technical issues, this video was re-recorded after the conference.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Demystifying Privacy Preserving Computing by Tejas Chopra (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-26 | When it comes to privacy, encrypted data-in-transit (eg: HTTPS) or encrypted data-at-rest (eg: encrypted hard-disks) schemes provide sufficient cryptographic guarantees in the battle to protect it. The unresolved problem is encrypting data-in-use. Currently, in order to process data, we need to decrypt, process, and re-encrypt. Computation over unencrypted data may compromise the confidentiality of data and suffer various security attacks Privacy-Preserving Computing (PPC) has emerged in recent years to enable the secure computation of the data without revealing the content of the data. These techniques look at how to represent data in a form that can be shared, analyzed, and operated on without exposing the raw information We will discuss current state-of-the-art PPC techniques and the distinct threat models and business use cases they address. The techniques we will cover are: Secure multiparty computation (SMPC), Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), Differential privacy (DP)Tejas ChopraSenior Software Engineer, NetflixTejas Chopra is a Senior Software Engineer, working in the Data Storage Platform team at Netflix, where he is responsible for architecting storage solutions to support Netflix Studios and Netflix Streaming Platform. Prior to Netflix, Tejas was working on designing and implementing the storage infrastructure at Box, Inc. to support a cloud content management platform that scales to petabytes of storage & millions of users. Tejas has worked on distributed file systems & backend architectures, both in on-premise and cloud environments as part of several startups in his career. Tejas is an International Keynote Speaker and periodically conducts seminars on Micro services, NFTs, Software Development & Cloud Computing and has a Masters Degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, with a specialization in Computer Systems.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Of JavaScript Ahead-Of-Time Compilation Performance by Manuel Serrano (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-25 | JavaScript is particularly difficult to implement efficiently because most of its expressions have all sorts of different meanings that involve all sorts of different executions that are not distinguished by any syntactic or type annotation. The common intuition is that only JIT compilers can handle it efficiently because they can rely on heuristic-based strategies that require having the program and the data on hand. But static (AOT) compilers can speculate and use heuristics too! To demonstrate that, we have designed Hopc, an AOT compiler for JavaScript, based on the following assumption:The most likely data structure a program will use is the one for which the compiler is able to produce its best code.Thus, contrary to most AOT compilers, Hopc does not rely on complex static analyses to optimize programs. It simply tries to generate its best code that it protects with guards. In this talk, we will present its main optimizations and an in-depth performance analysis.Manuel SerranoInria, Senior ResearcherManuel Serrano is a researcher of INRIA, the french research institute in computer science. During all his career, he has been committed to implementing and releasing open source software applications. First, he has created the Bigloo compiler, an optimizing compiler for the Scheme programming language that is still widely in use. Since a decade, he has been focusing on creating new programming languages for the web. He first started with Hop, an extension of Scheme that enabled programmers to implement Web applications using that functionnal programming language. Hop, was one of the first project to consider JavaScript has a target of another high level programming language. Since, about two years, he allocates all his research resources to designing and developing Hop.js, a multitier extension of JavaScript. Manuel Serrano also contributes to open-source projects. In particular, he has created and maintained for the years, Flyspell.el, the Emacs on-the-fly spell checker. ------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Time Travel Debugging JavaScript Applications by Cecelia Martinez (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-25 | Developers spend up to half their time debugging, but often struggle to reproduce and investigate issues with existing developer tools. A time travel debugger lets you record a bug then pause, rewind, and fast-forward your application execution to dig in at specific points in time. You can even add console logs and evaluate expressions retroactively to go back in time and debug.This talk will walk through some common bugs that occur in JavaScript applications and how to approach them with time travel debugging. Debug along with interactive recordings using Replay.io to get hands-on practice with debugging real-world examples.Cecelia MartinezCommunity Lead, Replay.io@ceceliacreatesCecelia Martinez is dedicated to building developer communities that are inclusive, constructive, and make software development a better experience for all. Her role as Community Lead at Replay.io involves coding, writing, speaking, teaching, and most importantly listening. She is a lead volunteer with Women Who Code Frontend, chapter head of Out in Tech Atlanta, a mentor, and part of the GitHub Stars program.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
AVIF: Creating a new image format in the open by Jon Bauman (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-24 | AVIF is the first new image format shipped by major browsers in over a decade. This talk will cover the motivation for its creation, the technical and process innovations in the standard and its implementations. I'll tell the story of my personal experiences learning and participating in the standards process as well as implementing support in Firefox with a new Rust-based parser. It will also cover the human perspective of working in the open and the dynamics of cooperating with tech giants as a Mozilla employee.Jon BaumanErstwhile Engineer @ Mozilla@AnoYaroJon Bauman is a fancier of cats who speaks quietly and patiently to computers in exchange for an exceedingly comfortable material existence. He has worked in many programming disciplines from console video games, web development, kernel programming, distributed systems and web browser development. He is a proud alumnus of the University of Michigan, Etsy and Mozilla. He enjoys helping others learn programming and trying to make tech more humane.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
If only I owned my data: Architecting decentralized data by Katharine Jarmul, Nimisha Asthagiri Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-24 | Today, our personal and business data are not in our own hands. They're trapped in silo-ed and proprietary centralized systems. Let's explore an alternative architecture and ecosystem, where industry-wide decentralized data ownership is the prime directive. To appreciate what this future entails, we tour related compositional elements of decentralized identity (user-controlled digital identity), privacy journeys (user-controlled data access), decentralized depositories (user-controlled data storage) and federated machine learning (distributed data analysis at system endpoints). Applied to real-world consumer applications, we examine tradeoffs of product resiliency, user privacy, data portability and durability. We leave you with concrete (open source) tools and emerging standards that you can leverage today, as technology leaders in the industry.katharine jarmulPrincipal Data Scientist & Privacy Activist@kjamKatharine Jarmul is a Principal Data Scientist at Thoughtworks Germany focusing on privacy, ethics and security for data science workflows. Previously, she has held numerous roles at large companies and startups in the US and Germany, implementing data processing and machine learning systems with a focus on reliability, testability, privacy and security.Nimisha AsthagiriPrincipal Digital Platform Strategist@nasthagiriNimisha Asthagiri is a Principal Consultant at Thoughtworks, a global technology consultancy that integrates strategy, design and engineering to transform enterprises to modern digital businesses. Prior, she was Chief Architect and Senior Director of Engineering at edX, driving intentional architecture for the next generation of large-scale online learning. She is a long-term technologist who values innovations that result from the amplification of diverse voices and the synergism of collective strength. Her past accomplishments include leading the security of a peer-to-peer group communications platform at Groove Networks.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Blueprints for a Universal Reasoning Machine by Zenna Tavares (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-22 | A long-standing objective of AI research has been to discover theories of general, human-like reasoning. These theories should explain the kind of slow and deliberative process that allows a mathematician to prove a new theorem, as well as the fast and unconscious process that allows us to pinpoint the source of a sound.The last two decades have brought steady advances toward this goal in the form of mature theories of probabilistic and causal inference, in increasingly expressive computational and mathematical languages, and in the explosion of deep learning methods.This session will introduce the idea of a universal reasoning machine as the evolution of these advances. Universal reasoning aims to be able to express all forms of knowledge and automate all forms of inference, at any scale, and in any domain.We will sketch a blueprint for such a machine, as well as for the organizational structures we think it will take to build it and apply it to the benefit of broad society.Zenna TavaresResearch Scientist, Columbia University / Co-Founder, Basis@ZennaTavaresZenna Tavares is the inaugural Innovation Scholar in Columbia University's Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Associate Research Scientist in the Data Science Institute, and Co-Founder of Basis Research. Zenna's research aims to understand how humans reason, that is, how they come to derive knowledge from observing and interacting with the world. He also constructs computational and statistical tools that help advance his work on causal reasoning, probabilistic programming, and other areas. Prior to Columbia University, he was at MIT, where he received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Statistics and was a Postdoctoral Research researcher in the Computer Science Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). Zenna's work has received significant recognition including an International Fulbright Science and Technology Award for Outstanding Foreign Students. ------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Art you can make by spying on yourself with your phone by Kate Hollenbach (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-21 | Throughout the day, a person gazes at their phone. Does the phone gaze back? What if it did? This talks shares a series of video works created with custom software called phonelovesyoutoo, an Android application that lovingly watches its user's activities by capturing video from the phone's front camera, back camera, and screen. The works explore what mobile devices see when they observe human bodies and how human presence is split between physical and virtual planes.Kate HollenbachArtist, programmer, professorKate Hollenbach is an artist, programmer, and educator based in Denver, Colorado, US. She creates video and interactive works examining critical issues in user interface and user experience design with a focus on user habits, data collection, and surveillance. Her art practice is informed by years of professional experience and as an interface designer and product developer. Formerly Director of Design and Computation at Oblong Industries, she led an interdisciplinary team of designers and programmers to develop cutting edge user experiences for collaborative environments and new interaction models for gestural devices. Kate holds an MFA from UCLA Design Media Arts and a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Emergent Digital Practices at University of Denver and serves on the Board of Directors for the Processing Foundation.
Disaster Recovery Options running Apache Kafka in Kubernetes by Geetha Anne (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-21 | Deploying a disaster recovery strategy for your Apache Kafka workloads can increase availability and reliability of your mission critical applications by minimizing data loss and downtime during unexpected disasters. So architecting a perfect Kubernetes based Kafka deployment requires careful consideration of several edge case scenarios. In this session, you will learn about : * Successful disaster recovery strategies in Kafka ecosystem like Active-active, Active-passive replication, multi regional stretched clusters etc., * How some of these DR techniques evolve, when Kubernetes is the chosen deployment platform * Automation or CI/CD tools that will help achieve this.Geetha AnneEvent Streaming Jedi@geethaayGeetha Anne is a Solutions engineer at Confluent with previous experience in executing solutions for data driven business problems on cloud, involving data warehousing and real-time streaming analytics. She has fallen in love with distributed computing during her undergrad days and followed her interest ever since. She enjoys teaching complex technical concepts to both tech savvy and general audiences.NOTE: Due to technical issues this talk was re-recorded after the conference without a live audience.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
An IPC Language For The Whole Operating System by Ian McKellar (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-21 | Fuchsia is a new open source operating system, developed primarily by Google. One of its distinctive features is the Fuchsia Interface Definition Language (FIDL) that is used to define the API and ABI boundaries between all the different parts of the system - from the kernel syscalls and driver module APIs to IPC between system services and end user GUI applications. Using a single language and IPC system across the whole stack provides many benefits but also presents some interesting challenges.Ian McKellarSenior Software Engineer on Fuchsia for Google@ianIan has been writing software professionally for 25 years. He's worked on a wide variety of systems from web apps to web browsers, mobile apps to mobile operating systems, device drivers to HTML & CSS. For much of his career he's managed to convince people to pay him to write open source software, from tiny startups to Google where he works currently. He lives on an island in the San Francisco Bay with his children, wife, cats and guitars.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Monad I Love You Now Get Out Of My Type System by Gjeta Gjyshinca (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-20 | Traditionally, libraries that support asynchronous execution invade the type system, with monad-like constructs changing function signatures, and execution concerns inevitably leaking into business logic.Our platform is different. Automated asynchronous execution; caching; a bitemporal data store; distribution; dependency tracking - these are just some of the core features our platform provides. And what do our users see? For the most part, five extra characters, @node, a guarantee of referential transparency for our compiler and runtime.Built on top of Scala and now a decade old, our platform draws on ideas from the Scala community to provide a solution for a programming framework that truly separates business logic from execution concerns. At last, it's being open-sourced, and it will run on cloud. Join this session to see live coding demos and a whole new paradigm for concurrency.Gjeta GjyshincaSoftware Developer, Morgan StanleyGjeta is a software developer at Morgan Stanley, working on the core of the platform she will present. Her work focuses on the cache and the scheduler, with a big focus on performance. Gjeta is involved in Morgan Stanley's volunteering efforts to teach students to code, expanding the programme in London and now involved in teaching at schools in New York. She has also worked with Global Code to teach students in Ghana, and is now involved in Talent Beyond Boundaries, a charity helping skilled refugees find work. ------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
How live music is evolving in a post pandemic world by Ben Michel (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-20 | As a musician + developer, enabling bands to perform together remotely has been a dream of mine for a long time. When the pandemic occurred, this problem went from being novel to becoming an actual need--as the best venue for live music became the screen.By only using a couple of browser APIs (Web MIDI & Worklets) and common multiplayer connections (WebSockets), it's now become possible to create an experience that's both exciting for musicians to use, and show-goers to enjoy.In this talk, you'll see how using a combination of standard Web APIs and Observability practices has enabled distributed live music. You'll also learn about how the remote show experience will become more exciting over time, and get a chance to play music together with the entire audience (no matter where you're joining from)!Ben MichelEvangelist at Datadog | OpenJS Foundation, Node.js, Unicode.@obensourceBefore he became a web developer, Ben spent a decade as a professional musician (performing, touring, recording) based in Portland, Oregon. He continues to support both the evolution of the arts, and the projects that push the Web forward (OpenJS Foundation, Node.js, tc39, Unicode Consortium). Ben has also led JavaScript meetups over the years (PDXNode, WebAudioPDX), and occasionally produces music.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Formally Verifying Everybodys Cryptography by Mike Dodds, Joey Dodds (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-20 | Nearly everybody relies on cryptographic libraries such as OpenSSL, but how can we be sure they are secure and bug-free? Formal verification offers an answer: using mathematical reasoning we can prove for certain that code behaves as we expected. Formal verification is an old idea, but recent advances have at last made it cost effective as an assurance tool for real-world cryptographic systems. This talk will explore what formal verification is, how we apply it to cryptography in production, and what lessons we can draw when securing other types of software systems.Mike DoddsPrincipal Scientist, Galois Inc@miikeMike is a principal scientist at Galois Inc focusing on engineering applications of formal methods. He has led many commercial and US-government funded research projects in cryptographic and distributed systems verification, and he previously led Galois' collaboration with Amazon Web Services. Before joining Galois in 2017, Mike was an academic at the University of York, UK, and a Royal Society Industry Fellow.Joey DoddsPrincipal Researcher, Galois@n1nj4Joey is a principal researcher at Galois, focused on applying formal methods and automated reasoning to industry. He co-leads Galois' ongoing collaboration with AWS. He also co-leads the verification effort that is a collaboration between Galois, Supranational, Ethereum Labs, and Protocol Labs. As a critical part of making those projects work, he also helps drive the direction of the SAW and Cryptol projects with a focus on making the tools more understandable and usable.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Hodor: Detecting and Addressing Overload in LinkedIn Microservices by Bryan Barkley Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-19 | When pushed hard enough any system will eventually suffer, and ultimately fail unless relief is provided in some form. At LinkedIn, we have developed a framework for our microservices to help with these issues: Hodor (Holistic Overload Detection & Overload Remediation). As the name suggests, it is designed to detect service overloads from multiple potential root causes, and to automatically improve the situation by dropping just enough traffic to allow the service to recover. Hodor then maintains an optimal traffic level to prevent the service from reentering overload. All of this is done without manual tuning or specifying thresholds. In this talk, we will introduce Hodor, provide an overview of the framework, describe how it detects overloads, and how requests are dropped to provide relief.Bryan BarkleySr. Staff Engineer at LinkedInBryan is an engineer at LinkedIn working with service infrastructure teams to improve the resiliency and availability of systems. He has been working with server side Java for over two decades. Prior to LinkedIn he was an engineer at TripAdvisor, Time Inc., Monster, and a variety of smaller startups.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
A Hipster History of CORS by Devdatta Akhawe (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-19 | CORS makes no sense when you first look at it. The only way it does is if you understand the history of how we got here; this talk will go through the history of the web and CORS and how we ended up designing something like this. If you have always been confused by CORS, you will find this talk useful. We will also cover modern cross origin standards (corp, corp, corb, coop, coep, oh my) and how they can help securely design modern web applications.Devdatta AkhaweDirector of Security, Figma@frgxDev works at Figma, as part of the Figma Security team. Before that he spent nearly 6 years at Dropbox in various roles in the Dropbox Security team. He joined Dropbox after his PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where his research focused on web and browser security. He is also an editor on the Sub Resource Integrity specification. Other details, including how to really pronounce his name are at devd.me-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
The Skip Ratchet by Brooklyn Zelenka (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-18 | Existing group key agreement protocols are unsuitable for use in decentralized and trustless environments. These protocols either require a stable and bounded set of peers, or they require coordination when renegotiating keys in response to membership changes. Further, local-first deployments also benefit from efficiently synchronizing with clients that have been offline for long periods of time, and from backward secrecy as new members are added to the group.This talk introduces a cryptographic ratchet that targets these use-cases, through a simple construction combining hierarchical hashing and skip lists. This "Skip Ratchet" has multiple production implementations, and is being used to drive a number of applications: including a decentralized, encrypted file system; and a local-first platform for collaborative data science.Brooklyn ZelenkaCTO @ Fission@expedeBrooklyn is the cofounder and CTO at Fission, where her team is building the next generation of web dev tools for the future of computing on the edge – leveling the playing field for teams of all sizes. She founded the Vancouver Functional Programming Meetup, and is the author of several Elixir libraries including Witchcraft & Exceptional. She was previously an Ethereum Core Developer, where she focused on improving the EVM. She continues to push the broader web and edge space forward with standards like UCAN auth, the WebNative File System, and the Dialog distributed database.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Hedy: A Gradual programming language by Felienne Hermans (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-18 | When kids learn to program they often use either a visual language like Scratch, or a textual language like Python. While visual languages are great for the first steps, children and educators often want to move on to textual, but early on, a textual language and its error messages can be scary. Hedy aims bridge this gap with a programming language that is gradual, using different language levels. In level 1, there is hardly any syntax at all; printing is done with: print hello! At every level, new syntax and concepts are added, so learners do not have to master everything at once. Hedy builds up to a subset of Python including conditions, loops, variables and lists. To make learning as accessible as possible, Hedy allows for the use of localized keywords, f.e in Spanish: imprimir Hello! This talk will discuss the pedagogy of Hedy as well as its technical aspects, since a set of changing and localized complex grammars poses several interesting challenges for parsing.Felienne HermansProgramming for all!@FelienneFelienne is associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University, where she heads the PERL research group, focused on programming education. She also works at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam one day a week, where she teaches prospective computer science teachers. Felienne is the creator of the Hedy programming language, and was one of the founders of the Joy of Coding conference. Since 2016, she has been a host at SE radio, one of the most popular software engineering podcasts on the web. Felienne is the author of “The Programmer's Brain” a book that helps programmers understand how their brains work and how to use it more effectively. In 2021, Felienne was awarded the Dutch Prize for ICT research. Felienne is a member the board of I&I, the Dutch association of high-school computer science teachers, and of TC39, the committee that designs JavaScript. Felienne blogs at felienne.com-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Level Up Your Machine Learning Lifecycle by Yaqi Chen (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-18 | How does an image-processing application that classifies animals accelerate the development of a vehicle license plate number detector? In this talk, Yaqi Chen, Lead Data Scientist at Object Computing, demonstrates how ML practitioners can achieve a level of scalability and generalization that opens up a vast landscape of possibilities. Using a real-world example, she illustrates how a series of plug-and-play modules built across the data, model, and deployment stages dramatically simplify the process of building an end-to-end ML project. If you could benefit from an ML lifecycle framework that allows you to continue tackling complicated real-world challenges, while enjoying shorter development time, simplified bug isolation, and a cleaner code base, this talk is for you!Yaqi ChenMachine Learning Strategy LeadYaqi received her PhD from Washington University in 2014 with a research focus in Algorithm Development and Information Theory for Medical Imaging. After graduating she joined a leading digital agricultural company where she led a group of data scientists and engineers and established a Machine Learning framework by leveraging imagery and geospatial data to improve on-farm productivity. Today she is working with clients across multiple industries as OCI continues to help companies simplify complex business processes with machine learning and data science. Additionally, she has also been a keen advocate of Women in Data Science as both a leader and mentor.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
What We Learned Dissecting the Worlds Most Popular Containers by Ayse Kaya (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-17 | Data scientist and container enthusiast Ayse Kaya and her team at Slim.AI analyzed more than 100 of the world's most popular public container images using open source tools to better understand what developers encounter when running containers in Kubernetes. What they found was a vast, varied, and complex world that gives developers massive opportunities to scale, but also presents risks to both security and productivity. This talk shares the data, visualizations, and insights they generated from their research. Kaya shows the current paradox in software supply chain practices (i.e. taking advantage of abstraction vs. knowing what's in the software you ship), and that even small, special purpose containers could have thousands of packages, libraries, and licenses, not to mention critical vulnerabilities. Finally, she'll highlight the current trade-offs teams make between “developer experience” and “production readiness”, and open a discussion about how we can improve as an industry.Ayse KayaSenior Director, Strategic Insights & Analytics@aykayaseAyse Kaya is the Senior Director of Strategy and Analytics at Slim.AI. She is an accredited data scientist and container enthusiast. A graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management's Operations Research Center, Kaya was previously a strategy and analytics lead at CloudLock and Cisco Systems. Ayse Kaya lives in Boston with her daughter. She is an avid runner and student of philosophy.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Beyond Blockchain: Convergent Consensus by Mike Anderson (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-17 | Despite considerable hype over recent years, blockchain technology has often failed to live up to the promise of providing cheap, accessible, high performance decentralised computing.We can do much better: A novel approach to consensus inspired by CRDTs and category theory can make decentralised computation efficient and scalable. Immutable persistent data structures and digital signatures help keep everything secure.In this talk we explore the Convergent Proof of Stake consensus algorithm and demonstrate how it can be used to implement efficient real-time decentralised computation using Convex Lisp, a functional language inspired by Clojure and the lambda calculus.Mike AndersonManaging Director, Convex Foundation@mikeraOver a varied career Mike has been CTO at several companies as well as a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Company where Powerpoint and Excel were the development tools of choice. Since the age of eight, Mike has had a passion for writing software and developed a strong interest in open source technology. He is a contributor and maintainer of open source code in the Java and Clojure ecosystems. In a vague attempt to find balance in life, Mike also volunteers his time as a modern jive dance teacher.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Powering Spotifys Audio Personalization Platform by Josh Baer (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-17 | Over 400 million people in 183 markets open their Spotify app at least once a month to see a brand new set of recommendations from a pool of 85+ million songs and podcasts. Those recommendations on the home page, in your playlist creation screen, from your search bar, and in your Discover Weekly are driven from Machine Learning models powered by a complex set of tools working in unison with the sole purpose of building a more intelligent Spotify product.In this talk, Josh Baer – product lead for Spotify's Machine Learning Platform – will walk you through the lifecycle of a song recommendation and the complex software that orchestrates the various backend, data and ML specialized libraries built to make the lives of Spotify engineers easier. He'll describe the challenges of creating a Platform that trains hundreds of models daily and serves millions of predictions per second for 50+ teams building ML for Spotify, and discuss why there are so many companies building similar tooling.Josh BaerSpotify's Machine Learning Platform Lead@j6aerJosh leads ML Platform at Spotify, growing an organization of product, design and engineering hyperfocused on increasing the productivity of ML practitioners. During his 9 years at Spotify, he has built data products as an engineer and product leader. He holds a MS in Computer Science from NYU and a BS in Philosophy/CS from the University of Pittsburgh. He's spent the pandemic on the Brooklyn waterfront with his partner, cat, and 14-month old daughter "Kiki".------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time by Andrés Plazas Malagón Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-16 | The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, currently under construction on Cerro Pachón in Chile, will feature an 8.4-meter telescope, the largest digital camera in the world for astronomy (3200 megapixels), an automated data processing system, and an online public engagement platform. Rubin will conduct the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), and it will operate on an automated cadence, capturing an area the size of 40 full moons and returning to the same area of sky approximately every three nights after imaging the full sky. The Rubin Observatory was the top-ranked large ground-based project in the 2010 Astrophysics Decadal Survey, and it will advance science in four main areas: the nature of dark matter and understanding dark energy, cataloging the Solar System, exploring the changing sky, and Milky Way structure and formation. Engineering and then science first light is expected in 2023 and full operations for the ten-year survey commencing in the second half of 2024.Andrés Plazas MalagónAssociate Research Scholar, Princeton University / Rubin Observatory@plazasmalagon1Andrés A. Plazas Malagón obtained his degree in physics at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He subsequently moved to the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) to obtain a doctoral degree in physics and astronomy. At Penn, he received the Zaccheus Daniel Foundation for Astronomical Science award. He also became part of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) project, working on weak gravitational lensing and testing the detectors of the Dark Energy Camera used by DES at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Fermilab. He continued his work on weak lensing as a research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he became part of the Dark Energy Science Collaboration of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). For his work in characterizing systematic errors in weak gravitational lensing, he received in 2016 the Fundación Alejandro Ángel Escobar national prize in Natural and Exact Sciences, one of the highest scientific recognition in his native Colombia.He joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2015 as a Caltech Postdoctoral Scholar, working on understating systematic errors in weak lensing from the infrared detectors that will be used by the wide-field imager of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Dr. Plazas Malagón also has worked as a Research Scientist at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, as part of the Cosmoquest project for community science. He currently works at Princeton University as an Associate Research Scholar in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, and is part of the Data Management Team of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. He is also a Visiting Scientist at the Department of Physics of Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Plazas Malagón is the founder of the Astronomy on Tap satellite branches in St. Louis and Trenton (NJ), is the creator and co-host of the astronomy podcast in Spanish “Visión Cósmica”, and frequently participates in science Education and Public Outreach events in Spanish and English as a NASA JPL Solar System Ambassador volunteer.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
LiveViewJS is the anti-SPA library for reactive app development in NodeJS and Deno by Donnie Flood Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-15 | LiveView is a novel approach to web development that leverages web sockets to ship user events to the server which then responds with very small UI diffs. Instead of developers needing to write both SPA front-end and API back-end, handle connections, authentication, routing, component libraries, etc, LiveView developers simply write code that reacts to four types of user events: clicks, form updates, key input, and focus/blur events and then renders an html template based the updated state. We will introduce and review the LiveViewJS library which automatically handles socket connections, client event handling, HTML and DOM-diffing, and updates, and provides an extremely simple API for developers to implement LiveViews in their favorite web server (e.g. ExpressJS, Oak, etc). The LiveView paradigm has been widely adopted by developers using Elixir with the Phoenix LiveView framework. LiveViewJS brings this simple yet powerful paradigm to NodeJS and Deno developers.Donnie FloodLiveViewJS Author / Serial Entrepreneur@floodfxDonnie Flood is the author of LiveViewJS and co-founder of RightHandGreen.com. Donnie is a serial entrepreneur and start-up engineering leader with over 20 years of experience including companies acquired by Google and LinkedIn.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
In the Land of the Sizing, the One-Partition Kafka Topic is King by Ricardo Ferreira Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-15 | Every technology has that key concept that people struggle to understand. With databases, is which join to use for fetching data from multiple tables. With containers, is which storage type to use depending on the workload. With Apache Kafka, the absolute winner is how many partitions to set for a topic. Sizing the number of partitions correctly is a hot topic for Kafka practitioners since doing it wrong affects other aspects of the system, such as consistency, concurrency, and durability. Worse, it also affects how much load Kafka can handle. This talk will peel off the concept of partitions and, using a what-if presentation style, explain what happens with the other aspects of the system given a number. It will highlight the consequences of poor decisions and whether you will be able to recover from them.Ricardo FerreiraSenior Developer Advocate@riferreiRicardo is Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, working in the developer relations team for North America. With +20 years of experience, he may have learned a thing or two about distributed systems, messaging, fast data analytics, databases, and observability. Before AWS, he worked for software vendors like Elastic, Confluent, and Oracle. Ricardo is well known for his remarkable ability to explain complex topics. He cunningly breaks them down into bite-sized pieces until anyone can understand. While not working, he loves barbecuing in his backyard with his family and friends, where he finally gets the chance to talk about anything unrelated to computers. He currently lives in North Carolina, USA, with his wife and son. Follow Ricardo on Twitter: @riferrei------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Formal Modeling and Analysis of Distributed Systems by Ankush Desai (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-15 | Distributed systems are notoriously hard to get right. Programming these systems is challenging because of the need to reason about the myriad possible interleaving of messages and failures. Unsurprisingly, it is common to uncover bugs after deployment. Formal methods (FM) can play an important role in addressing this challenge. But the key requirement for “success” in is the ability to integrate FM in all the phases of development process from system design, implementation, to unit and integration testing, and even in production through runtime monitoring. In this talk, we will provide an overview of the P programming framework. P is a state machine-based programming language for modeling and specifying complex distributed systems. We will discuss how P is currently being used extensively inside Industry and Academia, addressing the challenges mentioned above. P is open-source.Ankush DesaiSenior Applied Scientist, Amazon Web Services@ankushpdAnkush Desai is a Senior Applied Scientist in the Database Services (DBS) group at AWS. He is currently working on building formal tools and techniques that help developers reason about the correctness of complex distributed services across AWS (S3, DBS, EBS,). These techniques range from lightweight approaches like model checking, to systematic testing, to more rigorous deductive verification that provides mathematical proofs. . Before joining the DBS group, Ankush was part of the S3 team and worked on the Amazon S3's Strong Consistency project. Ankush graduated with a PhD in computer science from UC, Berkeley (2019). His PhD. research had an impact both in Industry and Academia for which he was awarded the Sevin Rosen Funds Award for Innovation. Before joining graduate school, Ankush spent 2+ years working at Microsoft Research, India working on formal verification of device drivers and distributed systems. Webpage: ankushdesai.github.io------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Resillient Microservices without the Chaos by Christopher Meiklejohn (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-14 | Microservice applications introduce additional complexity: partial failure can render one or more required dependencies of a given service unavailable at any time. Therefore, we should ensure our applications are resilient to partial failure before we deploy them.In this talk, we will discuss a new approach for resilience testing, Service-Level Fault Injection Testing, and a tool that implements it, called Filibuster. Filibuster verifies microservice application behavior under failure, starting from the existing functional tests that your organization is already writing. Filibuster combines static analysis, test synthesis, and principled fault injection to identify bugs before code ships to production. We will not only discuss the core algorithms behind Filibuster, but also discuss the challenges of technical transfer of academic code: from adapting algorithms to practical implementations of academic code based on a large microservice deployment that powers a popular app.Christopher MeiklejohnPh.D. StudentPreviously a practitioner, Christopher worked on large-scale distributed systems at Basho, Mesosphere, and Machine Zone. Before that, he managed software development for Berklee College of Music, and worked in a data center where he supported the Boston Marathon and the Kraft Group (i.e. New England Patriots and the New England Revolution.) ------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Workflows, a new abstraction for distributed systems by Dominik Tornow (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-13 | For the past 45 years, the database systems community has enjoyed an unparalleled developer experience: Database Transactions mitigate challenges such as failure on a platform level, entirely eliminating these challenges on an applications level.Unfortunately, the distributed systems community has not enjoyed a similar developer experience: There was no equivalent abstraction that mitigates challenges like failure on a platform level.However, many companies, including Snap, Uber, and Netflix, are adopting a new paradigm: Workflows. Workflows are to distributed systems what transactions are to databases.This talk explores how Workflow Systems mitigate challenges on a platform level and provide a developer experience for distributed systems that rivals the developer experience for databases, allowing you to literally code as if failure does not even exist!Dominik TornowTemporal, Principal Engineer@DominikTornowDominik Tornow is a Principal Engineer at Temporal. He focuses on systems modeling, specifically conceptual and formal modeling, to support the design and documentation of complex software systems.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Dont Get Owned by Your Dependencies by Shravan Narayan (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-13 | Memory safety vulnerabilities in third party C libraries are a major source of zero-day attacks in today's applications. Several years ago our team began exploring a new approach to mitigate these attacks in Firefox, which relies on third party libraries for everything from media rendering to spell checking.To accomplish this, we began migrating Firefox to an architecture where these libraries are run in lightweight in-memory sandboxes (based on WebAssembly). Firefox has been shipping with this new architecture since 2020.In this talk, we discuss the key challenges we faced, such as: ensuring efficient sandboxing, retrofitting sandboxing without changing libraries, and most importantly, modifying applications originally written to trust libraries to be secure against attacks from (sandboxed) libraries. We will talk about RLBox, a new open source C++ framework that we developed to meet these challenges. We share some examples of our own experience applying RLBox in Firefox.Shravan NarayanPh.D student, UC San Diego@ShrNarayanShravan Narayan is a PhD candidate at UC San Diego, advised by Deian Stefan. His research interests span security and systems. He is particularly interested in retrofitting security in large real-world systems like browsers. Shravan and his collaborators have won the Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2020, received an honorable mention at the NSA Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition, and won the applied research competition at CSAW 2020. His work is deployed in multiple real systems, including the Firefox browser.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
How to Avoid Safety Hazards when using Closures in Scala by Philipp Haller (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-13 | Closures, or lambda expressions, are an essential language feature to work productively with popular data processing engines like Apache Spark and Flink, and they enable functional programming, a style of programming that is gaining popularity for composable programming with effects (such as I/O), among others. However, more and more use cases in parallel and distributed programming are testing the limits of the flexibility of closures. For example, the requirement for closures to be serializable is a common source of errors when developing data processing or streaming applications. In a concurrent setting, for example, when programming with futures and promises, closures must be used with great care in order to prevent safety hazards like race conditions. In this talk you will learn how to spot potentially unsafe code using closures, how to write safer closure-using code, and how to use newly developed library components to increase the flexibility and safety of closures in Scala.Philipp HallerAssociate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, SwedenPhilipp Haller is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the leading technical university in Sweden. He is co-author of Scala's async/await extension for asynchronous programming, and one of the lead designers of Scala's futures library. Main author of the book "Actors in Scala," he created Scala's first widely-used actor library. Dr. Haller was part of the team that received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award in 2019 for the development of the Scala programming language. He is also one of the founders of the Software Development Academy at KTH, a 3-month accelerated training program in software development, which was selected finalist for the Tech Skills and Talent Award of Tech Awards Sweden in 2022. Dr. Haller received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from EPFL, Switzerland, in 2010 and a Diplom-Informatiker degree from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, in 2006.------ Sponsored by: ------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Avoiding the Pitfalls of Autoscaling with Constant Work by David Grizzanti (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-12 | The idea of auto-scaling, geo-redundancy, and high-availability for internet applications has been around for a number of years, however, many of the traditional scaling and failover patterns overlook regional outages and cascading failures. The most common practices have applications scale as demand increase or in the case of regional outages.If you've ever wondered if there is an alternative way to manage these risks, this talk is for you!We'll look at the concept of constant work as an alternative to scaling on-demand and avoiding cascading failures when systems fail. Particularly, we'll dig into systems that implement this idea of constant work, how to deal with the trade offs of scale and cost, and where may be good areas for you to invest in this idea.Lastly, we'll dig into a concrete example by showing off a system with both methods implemented to test our theory in practice!David GrizzantiThe New York Times, Principal Engineer@dgrizzantiDavid Grizzanti is a Principal Engineer at The New York Times focused on improving developer productivity by enabling engineering teams to more effectively and efficiently build, test, integrate and deploy software. Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at Comcast, where he oversaw the development of multi-tenant software platforms that support tens of millions of customers across North America. His areas of interests include improving infrastructure automation, open source communities, and engineering leadership.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Introducing the HandAxe Collections Pattern Language by Maurice Rabb (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-12 | Often, the worst enemy of a better solution is an existing solution that's just good enough. New programming languages often borrow from prior languages, yet non-ideal choices from the past frequently live on. Haphazardly designed method protocols – method names, parameters, and return values – make core libraries harder to understand and limit their expressive power.HandAxe is a pattern language for specifying collection protocols. It emphasizes consistency, composability, im|mutability, and mis|understandability. It begins by rigorously defining terms for referencing collection aspects: key, value, element, span, edge, index, etc. – aka “grips.”Using a small grammar of operators and modifiers, HandAxe enables one to specify an ideal naming, protocol, and semantics for methods. Further, it enables method implementations to be autogenerated on demand. While implemented in JavaScript, HandAxe offers a unified approach for developing collection libraries in a wide range of languages.Maurice RabbSpantree - Director of Pedagogy@mauricerabbI'm Director of Pedagogy at Spantree Technology Group LLC, and am passionate about mentoring junior engineers. I taught software engineering for 10 years, most recently as an instructor at Dev Bootcamp. When not waxing wistfully about the Smalltalk debugger, I enjoy playing board games with my daughter, exploring unusual maps, eating exotic fruits, and acting as the building super at our extended family compound on the South Side of Chicago.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
Polymorphism Unbound by Bruce Eckel (Strange Loop 2022) Strange Loop Conference 2022-10-12 | Learned through inheritance, it can be difficult to see the big picture of polymorphism: a function parameter that accepts more than one type. Different forms of polymorphism determine what types can be accepted and what you can do with those types within the function. This talk improves your ability to reason about polymorphism by exploring different abilities and constraints in languages like C++, Java, Python, Kotlin and Scala.Bruce EckelAuthor/Consultant@BruceEckelBruce Eckel (www.MindViewLLC.com) is the author of Thinking in C++, Thinking in Java, Atomic Scala, On Java 8, Atomic Kotlin, and other books. He's written numerous blog posts (www.BruceEckel.com), over 150 magazine articles, and has given hundreds of presentations throughout the world. He was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and was for many years the chair of both the C++ and Java tracks at the Software Development Conference. With James Ward, he creates the Happy Path Programming podcast. He cofounded the JavaPosse Roundup Conference (now the Winter Tech Forum) and created Evolve Coworking in Crested Butte, CO. He periodically holds Developer Retreats and provides public and private training and consulting in programming languages and software design.-------- Sponsored by: --------Stream is the # 1 Chat API for custom messaging apps. Activate your free 30-day trial to explore Stream Chat. gstrm.io/tsl
