The Strange Loop, as it was last year, an awesome conference. The conference had so many great speakers on a rather diverse range of subjects. Although The Strange Loop is sponsored by many organizations they manage to keep the sales pitches to a reasonable level. With most of the sponsors at tables reasonably out of the way. Although so do sponsor talks they, the talks are not direct pitches.

Processing the talk afterwards and sharing thoughts is one of the primary reasons to attend in person. Asking the random person also filing out after the talk or that person who is also waiting for the next part provides awesome views I would have never thought about. Going out with other Strange Loopers, no matter if it’s for a coffee before hand dinner or just grabbing drinks is a great time. There was definitely a mass of great conversation at the Union Station Lounge area.

Although I went in thinking it would be a hard technical talk, I found the talk regarding Asyncs most engaging. Both Rust and Node have great approaches to dealing with the C10K problem. With the speaker heavily biased towards Rust due to her active involvement with the community she identified a problem many open source projects have: a lack of vision and alignment to that vision. She presented an argument both NodeJS and JavaScript should revisit their vision. Through the vision derrvies the backbone of decisions and decision making processes.

Throughout my entire trip I managed to avoid using a car. Despite this I did use the conference busses three tiems, mainly due to timing between talks. I really enjoy carless vacataions. Saint Louis has a decent light rail system which will get you from the airport and down town fairly efficiently. Once down town I walked with the other Loopers to the resurants and coffee shops. If you have an 8am flight you should be weary of taking the MetroLink light rail system since the earliest it will get you to the airport is 5am. I lucked out an found myself in a shorter queue but many people took a while to file through. More on Strange Loop to come as I digest my notes and expierences.