Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

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St. Louis, MO

About

Strange Loop was a multi-disciplinary conference that brought together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow's technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, security, and the web.

Strange Loop was created in 2009 by software developer Alex Miller and later run by a team of St. Louis-based friends and developers under Strange Loop LLC, a for-profit venture. The last event happened in 2023.

Some of our guiding principles:

No marketing. Keynotes are never sold to sponsors. The conference mailing lists are never sold or given to sponsors.

Tech, not process. Talks are in general code-heavy, not process-oriented (agile, testing, etc). There are many fine speakers, topics, and conferences in the process area. This is not one of them.

Technology stew. Interesting stuff happens when you get people from different areas in the same room. Strange Loop has a broad range of topics from academia, industry, and a touch of weirdness.

Moderately priced. Strange Loop jettisons some traditional aspects of a conference and runs lean to provide you more value for the money.

Talks are only part of the picture. Strange Loop is not just about learning in traditional sessions. It is also about making connections, sharing ideas, and creating value for the community.

Reasonable length. 2-3 days is the sweet spot for a conference. 1-day conferences are not worth the travel time. Conferences longer than 3 days are not sustainable - if you're doing it right you can't soak in any more information at that point anyways.

Organizers