speakers

I've finished tabulating the Strange Loop ratings and I'm pleased to announce the Strange Loop 2009 Rock Stars!

The top rated speaker was easily Charles Nutter with an average rating of 4.79/5. Several other speakers also garnered high ranks across the board and are the 2009 Rock Stars:

1. Charles Nutter
2. Ken Sipe
3. Jeff Brown
4. Bob Lee
5. Alex Payne
6. Matt Taylor

Many other speakers also got excellent ratings and in general I am very, very pleased with how the conference schedule turned out.

I have slides from most of the talks and you can find them on this page. A few more are still coming in and will show up there as they do.

There were a number of video and projector issues at Strange Loop but we managed to have every presenter give every presentation. I have to call out Hudson Akridge though who did a heroic, even EPIC presentation job. His talk was heavily code-based and required his laptop, which only worked while connected directly to the projector.

For some reason, the 1 pm center theater slot seems to be a strange attractor for chaos. Anyhow, that slot will now be Bob Lee's talk on the Java reference API and garbage collection, which is an excellent deep dive into areas that are scary or wholly unknown for most Java developers.

Check out The Ghost in the Virtual Machine: A Reference to References.

Due to logistical issues, there are two last-minute speaker changes (session topics are the same though). Jesse Wilson will not be able to make it out for his talk on dependency injection so Bob Lee will fill in instead.

Also, Steve Hawkins will not be able to make it for his talk on Teiid so Ramesh Reddy will be doing that one instead.

No conference is immune from logistical issues. We've had one speaker cancellation recently - Guillaume Laforge from SpringSource will be unable to make it to talk about the future of Groovy. I was really disappointed to hear this but stuff happens.

Stu Hood (@stuhood) is the Technical Lead for the Search team in the Email & Apps division of Rackspace. He also is a contributor to the Apache Cassandra project, which is a new distributed database project. Cassandra has gained some notoriety lately due to its prominent use at Facebook, no stranger to problems of scale.

This weekend I posted two lunchtime panel discussions:

Programmers Turned Entrepreneurs - Jim Brasunas, local IT startup connector and guru from ITEN, will be moderating this panel with some local entrepreneurs - Dave Karandish (Announce Media), Bob Lozano (Appistry), and Tom Niermann (CarOwner.com).

Matt Taylor (@rhyolight) is a St. Louis area developer with a diverse array of experiences. He enjoys a main course of dynamic languages like Groovy and Javascript with a side of agile, washed down by the quenching taste of the web. Matt is a frequent presenter on these topics and more and will be presenting a talk at Strange Loop called "jQuery: The JavaScript Library of the Future".

Dr. Stefan Schmidt (@schmidtstefan) has been working with SpringSource for almost two years and has been a key developer on the Spring Roo team in Sydney, Australia. Spring Roo is a project designed to assist you in creating fully working Java applications based on Spring technologies. Stefan will be speaking about Spring Roo at the Strange Loop conference.