Unsessions

Unsession proposals

This wiki page is for suggestions for Strange Loop 2019 "Unsessions". On the evening of Friday Sept 13th, we have rooms available for you to meet with others with similar interests - please suggest topics here and we'll take the ones with the most interest!

• When: Friday Sept 13th, 7-10 pm (in 60 min slots)
• Where: Union Station Hotel, Regency AB, Regency C, Grand F
• Equipment: All rooms will have A/V available

Proposed talk template - copy this section and modify

• Hosted by: your name / twitter
• Description: short description of what this is about
• Interest: add your Twitter ID or name if interested in this talk

Getting in the saddle with the Pony programming language

• Hosted by: Andrew Turley @casio_juarez
• Description: Pony is a type-safe, compiled, actor-based programming language that provides compile-time data safety guarantees. Two of the most interesting features are the reference capability system that guarantees safety by controlling how objects can be shared between actors, and the event-based runtime. In this session I'll spend some time introducing Pony and then answer questions and walk through some code. By the end of the session participants should feel like they know what makes Pony unique and have a good feel for the kinds of problems they might tackle with it.
• Interest: [@dave_yarwood] @saadasif

Functional package management and deployment with Nix

• Hosted by: Vaibhav Sagar @vbhvsgr
• Description: Nix is a package manager, and a programming language for writing packages in that package manager, that enables reliable and reproducible software development workflows, e.g. a reproducible dev environment, a package that installs correctly every time, and even pain-free service deployments. In this session I plan to demonstrate packaging and deploying software with Nix, after which I will take questions and/or start a discussion. By the end of the unsession participants should have a working understanding of what problems Nix can solve and how to integrate it into their software development workflows.
• Interest: @phanboy_iv @rfn @dave_yarwood @johnicholas @senorsmile @absynce @joedevivo @mioalter

The State Of Wireless Radio Tech in 2019 (alt. title 'Wow, Bluetooth Sucks Ass, Huh')

• Hosted by: Ben Leggett @bleggett
• Description: Let's sit down and chat about various kinds of wireless radio tech (LoRA, LTE (4G/5G/NB), Bluetooth, Sigfox, and stuff I don't know much about like Wize), their positives and negatives, and the current state of PANs/LPWAN stacks and radio tech for both the tinkerer and commercial uses. This will be less of a directed session and more of a basic overview leading into a Q&A+roundtable chat for the curious and/or the interested.
• Interest:

Healthcare tech, HIPAA, HITRUST, and PHI

• Hosted by: @compiledwrong
• Description: Chat about the quirks of working in healthcare tech, signing BAAs, audits, query logging, the incredible frustration of american healthcare payer systems (insight on other countries very welcome!), flat-files, pharmacy APIs and pharmacy switch integration. If you were at HIMSS we'd love to hear a recap/highlights :)
• Interest: @kf @aefernandes @dave_yarwood

The Dutch Call It "Niksen"

• Hosted by: Andrew Lenards (gh: @lenards, t: @alenards)
• Description: In a time when everything can be optimized for productivity, there is always something you could be doing. What if we made time to "do nothing" as an antidote to all these somethings? The Dutch call it "Niksen." And, as researcher Carolien Hamming is quick to point out, they did not invent or discover this. It has been a thread throughout cultures. Recent research indicates a "purposeless" approach helps manage stress & recover from burnout. Jenny Odell's recent "How to Do Nothing" even offers this as an approach to "Stand Apart", where choosing to "do nothing" becomes quite meaningful. As a meditating coach, Andrew will provide an introduction topic and offer an optional guided meditation in a technique aptly named "Do Nothing." (Also, it should be acknowledged this topic sits precariously in a time when choosing to "do nothing" comes out of, or signals, privilege; though, this approach may be an act of self-preservation. The topic is offered for consideration with our context in mind)
• Interest: @tennety @saadasif @absynce

Datomic

• Hosted by: Marshall Thompson, Ben Kamphaus
• Description: Come discuss Datomic with other users and (at least one) member of the Datomic team. Short intro to Datomic and lots of Q&A
• Interest: @ericyoshimura_ @riadvargas

Are All Blockchains the same?

• Hosted by: João Peixoto @joaomppeixoto, Kristie Howard @kristiehow, Prasanna Gautam @prasincs
• Description: At the heart of each blockchain, a very hard consensus problem is being solved. Often called the Byzantine Fault Tolerance problem - blockchains represent the various technical approaches to solve the problem of keeping thousands of strangers honest and consistent. Each block stores information like hash of previous block, data, time, and balances and accounts where transactions are being made. You can take it a step further and treat them as individual state machines or even turing machines! However, these systems are designed by and for people, and often contain the economic incentives and historical lineage of reasons why each blockchain came to exist. We have had the unique opportunity to work with different blockchains that have made different tradeoffs in these dimensions and would love to discuss more. Are blockchains standing atop the shoulders of giants? Or reinventing whole new concepts of money, accounts, balances, and transfer of value? Blockchains are fun, but in the spirit of StrangeLoop, we’ll host a session of talkchain where you get to ask each other and us questions.
• Interest: @luisc

End-to-end Type Safety with GraphQL

• Hosted by: João Peixoto @joaomppeixoto, Kristie Howard @kristiehow, Prasanna Gautam @prasincs
• Description: In most web applications, the frontend and backend of a project are tied together by a REST API, with little-to-no guarantee that changes to the backend or the API will not break the frontend. In this session, we will cover how GraphQL’s strongly typed schema can protect you from ever breaking your client-server API contract again, saving you countless hours on mistakes, typos, and incompatibilities. We will demonstrate how you can use GraphQL tooling to seamlessly explore your API schema with autocomplete, generate custom TypeScript/Flow types based on your API queries, and integrate those types to achieve full type-safety from the backend all the way to the frontend. Join us if you’re curious about GraphQL or if you’ve been using it for years - no matter the level we’re happy to chat!
• Interest:

Crux - build your own bitemporal database

• Hosted by: Jeremy Taylor @refset, Jon Pither @jonpither
• Description: Crux, as featured earlier the same day in "Temporal Databases for Streaming Architectures", is an unbundled database that provides bitemporal versioning, eviction and consistent ad-hoc Datalog queries on top of Kafka. We will walk through a few interplanetary tutorials, lift the hood on some interesting internals (Clojure!) and give a tour of the user interface. Q&A throughout.
• Interest: @justinmimbs, @luciodale

The divergent histories of particle physics and computing

• Hosted by: Jim Pivarski (gh: @jpivarski)

• Description: While studying the history of particle physics, I couldn't help but notice how the early years (1940's‒50's) drove innovations in electronic computing. The first (non-classified) digital computer, ENIAC, was designed by John Mauchly for ballistics, repurposed for the Manhattan Project by John von Neumann, and applied to particle simulations by Nicholas Metropolis—all physicists. By 1957, physicists were building Franckensteins (with a "c"), human-computer interfaces to speed up batch processing of bubble chamber photos. Meanwhile, computer science branched out in a different direction: interactivity, from time-sharing to graphical user interfaces to social networking. Another, often hidden, part of this story is that the majority of the programmers in both worlds were women (all of the ENIAC programmers, for instance). Much of this diversity was lost by the 1980's, when computing entered mainstream culture. I'd like to host an unsession that isn't a formal talk but a meeting to share resources—I'll show pictures, anecdotes, and sources that I've found with the intention of being interrupted by whatever you have to share.

• Interest: add your Twitter ID or name if interested in this talk