Lightning Talks #

SUBMISSIONS ARE NOW CLOSED!

This page should be used to propose lightning talks for Strange Loop 2019. This event will be held on the evening of Friday, September 13, at Union Station in Grand F from 8:00-9:30 pm. Talk proposals can be on any topic (subject to review and possible removal by conference organizers) and should be 5-7 minutes in length. To propose a talk, please add the name of the talk, a description, and your name (Twitter, Github, or other social networking profile links are allowed). Talks will be selected primarily based on a popular vote among attendees.

• Title by speaker - Description (short)
• History, Condensed by **@ ** - A short introduction to it all...

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• Pac-man Specification and Synthesis by Adam Marks - Can we synthesize a Pac-man clone from the ground up on a reversible computing substrate? This project combines two areas of interest, reversible computing and program synthesis, from mathematical and practical standpoints, using Pac-man as a motivating example. I'll show the Flip Machine, a minimal reversible computer with two instructions, and describe some questions that have come up in attempting to synthesize software for it.

• That Time I Wrote A Programming Language (To Draw Pictures) by Andrew Turley - Last year, inspired by some work that I saw at Strange Loop and the fact that I hadn't done much with my Cricut plotter lately, I decided to embark on a series of small generative art projects. Being the impractical sort, and having fallen in love with programming via a stack-based language, part of the project involved slowly implementing half of a broken version of the PostScript drawing language. This talk will cover the project, the language, and what I learned along the way.

• Orbiting the Giant Hairball for Software Engineers by Rainya Mosher (@rainyamosher) – What does creativity and the 30-year career of Gordon, a Hallmark Greeting Cards illustrator turned Creative Paradox, have to do with software development? After managing software teams for 20+ years while maintaining an active creative life as a stage actress, I am certain most software engineers are creative geniuses who use the keyboard as their brush and their language of choice as paint. Like most geniuses, they all too easily get crushed by the weight of corporate reality and expectations to deliver faster than before. Referencing Gordon MacKenzie’s book Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, I’ll introduce the concept of Orbiting as a way to reconnect with our inner creative and effectively push the boundaries of ingrained corporate patterns. Feeling like you might be close to burn out? Before you decide to coast your way to a PIP and a pink slip, only to repeat the pattern at the next high-pressure job, give Orbiting a try instead.

• How a Pinball Machine Works by Sarah Withee - Have you ever looked inside a pinball machine? It's full of dozens of assorted components and hundreds of feet of wire. There's a lot of really fascinating things going on and I want to take a short journey inside! You'll see (with pictures) how some simple things like bumpers and tilt sensors work. It all looks so simple, but below the surface the complexity is quite awesome to think about. You might not ever look at a pinball machine the same way again!

• Are you neglecting your Release Pipeline? by Glen Mailer - According to the research from Nicole Foresgren & co for Accelerate, cycle time is one of the best predictors of organisational success. A major factor in that cycle time is the gap between getting a change approved and that change reaching actual customers - which is where your CI/CD pipeline sits. When was the last time you actually spent time thinking about your pipeline? When did you last try and optimise it? What even is good? I'll try and offer some practical advice for shortening the time from idea to delivery. (disclaimer: I work for CircleCI, but I was into this stuff before I worked here, and I promise to keep it general.)

• Why Africa should have Locally Sourced Robotics Kit(s) by Simeon Adebola (@funmilore) - This talks makes the case for why given predicted trends across the African continent, and recent economic developments and the potential role of robotics in education; the continent should have a locally sourced robotics kit that would enable the education of its burgeoning child and youth population. Some parallels can be seen in the telephony and mobile banking spaces on the continent.

• Model Rot, and how to cope with it by Laurel Ruhlen (@Yelling At Computers on Slack) - Good news: you've successfully sprinkled data science on something and deployed it to production! Bad news: shadowy forces are already at work to circumvent all your hard work. It's true: predictive models, much like milk, have a limited shelf life. Unlike milk, sadly, predictive models don't come with a clear expiration date. This talk explains why models go bad, how to estimate their expiration date, and how you can exploit that knowledge to defeat the shadowy forces that seek to bypass your algorithmic defenses.

• Dealing With Data When The Engineers Know How To Program by Manuel Odendahl - I work at Formlabs, a company where data coming from tens of thousands of in-field 3D printers, internal prototyping and science is analyzed by engineers who know "too much python" for their own good. The result is mix of self-hosted python services, python scripts shared on slack, analysis run on "some CSV I scp'd off the machine". I will give a short overview on the infrastructure I'm building to catch up to the engineer's cleverness, and provide reproducible, reviewable and discoverable data analysis.

• Intro to End to End Testing with Cypress.io by Kevin Old (@kevinold) - Have you wondered if there was a better way to test your web application end-to-end? In this talk, I will show how to quickly test any web application using Cypress.io - a modern open source test runner designed to make you more productive. Cypress provides fast feedback, full access to the application, time travel, real time reloads and most importantly a great developer experience. Join me as offer an introduction to this ground breaking tool for developers and QA engineers.

• Intro to livecoding with ORCΛ by Emil Ng - I've been feeling limited by traditional music sequencers, but have avoided live coding environments because they feel too much like more coding after I've already been coding all day. Enter ORCΛ, a live coding environment where programs look like ASCII Rube Goldberg machines but are surprisingly intuitive once you understand how the system works. I hope to give an intro to this language where every letter of the alphabet is a command and you can see the complete state of a program and modify that state while it's running.

• Scripting to Stay Sane in the Days of Information Overwhelm by Hailey Rene Hinson - We live in a world of too much email, too many meetings, multiple calendars, multiple bank accounts and just general information overwhelm. It's just too much! But there are ways to handle all this data and avoid overwhelm... scripts!! I have scripts for dealing with my calendar, email, accounting, and more! This presentation will briefly demonstrate how I use simple python and Google app scripts to help wrangle all the data to stay sane and productive.

• From chatting to Emoji programming by Renat Idrisov - As we use Emojis more intensively for chatting, we can use them for concise programming. In this talk, I am going to demo EmojiLisp, a tool for fun experiments with custom Emoji sets as Lisp dialects.