Bottom Line Up Front: In my time as a software developer I have attended many conferences and have never found an event that is more dear to my technical heart. You will probably be better served by skipping my own interpretation and finding something you love in the archive of StrangeLoop talks.

If you are still reading then it is officially [past time] for a quick write up of some of the highlights.

A Hipster History of CORS

While CORS is certainly not the favorite topic of any developer; this talk by Devdatta Akhawe is both an informative and entertaining dive into the subject.

A few reasons it is worth your time:

  • Not only does the talk give you a good understanding of how the CORS system works but it also provides interesting historical insight into how and why CORS came into existence (did you know that the XHR was born from a product manager at Microsoft working on the Outlook Web Application!?)
  • The historical insight around CORS is really a nice little history of some significant milestones in the history of web development itself.
  • It delves into the how and why of a number of other security-related headers in use in modern web development (if you loved CORS, you might also love CORB, CORP, COOP, and COEP!)

A Case for Correctly Rounded Math Libraries

There was also fantastic content in the Papers We Love conference that occurred the day before. The Case for Correctly Rounded Math Libraries talk by Dr. Santosh Nagarakatte in particular stood out to me.

While these days my day job is not particularly focused on numeric computing; this talk brought me back to my time building optimization models for the supply chain industry. Our solutions were mixed integer linear programming models [and associated heuristics] that made use of elementary floating point operations. I spent countless hours with our customers talking about why the outputs of the model run on my computer differed from the output of the model run on their computer.

The work Dr. Nagarakatte and his colleagues have done under the RLIBM Project to produce accurate and performant floating point results for elementary operations that behave consistently across computing architectures is thrilling stuff. [Really!]

This talk has it all:

  • It will leave you with an increased appreciation for the hard work that is put into making modern software development possible.
  • It demonstrates how a flip in perspective can result in elegant solutions to old problems
  • It tells the story in a way that is clear and engaging for a wide audience of technical professionals

Expert Software Developers’ Approach to Error

While Strange Loop is primarily focused on tech rather than process, Dr. Marian Petre’s keynote talk was both timely and thought-provoking as we seek to improve our craft and adapt to a remote-oriented world of work. By looking at how “expert software developers” approach errors, Dr. Petre dishes out some great advice on how to improve as both an individual and as a team.

Here are a few behaviors I would like to continue or topics to think more about:

  • Be attentive to the context and scope of your project and use it to deal with errors. Deal with errors socially by providing the team with definitions of what is acceptable and what is not. Deal with errors technically by wrapping the code to only function within expected conditions.

  • Expert and novice software developers make the same number of mistakes. The difference is that expert software developers have more experience identifying and correcting mistakes, breaking out of negative feedback cycles, and in articulating the conditions that precipitated the mistake.

  • High performing teams know each other and have active channels of informal communication.

This last one in particular is something I believe many engineering teams are continuing to grapple with as they have moved from an in-person-first to a remote-first world.

A Few More

  • If you are wondering what all of this “Software Supply Chain” rumbling is about then Kelsey Hightower’s Secure Software Supply Chain talk is a great place to start.
  • For those of us interested in open source software: Remember When We Broke the Internet? is an entertaining and insightful look at some key moments in the history of open source software development.
  • Temporal’s workflows are an ingenious way of creating more reliable distributed transactions using coroutines and I am looking for an excuse to try them out.
  • If you love video games then John Romero talking about The Early Days of id Software is quite a trip.

All Good Things…

While Strange Loop 2023 looks to be the final iteration of this incredible event; I am already over-the-moon with anticipation. With keynotes from three folks who have each played a role in my technical-life (Scott Hanselman, Julia Evans, and Randall Munroe) the last Strange Loop is shaping up to be one for the ages.