PolyConf 2014, a travelogue, part 2

PolyConf 2014 – Talks from Day 1

Morning began with fine cappuccino coffee and honey-spread bread. After initial difficulty to find the venue, me and my companion made it to the large school building where the conference was hosted. Here is an image of us failing to walk into the right building:

Failing to get into the conference

Talks began immediately.

I choose to present some of my notes from the talks here.

Audience participation in the talk hall was not so edifying. As always: “Don’t be that guy.”

The Value Of Diversity And Other Lessons From Biology

Garret Smith, an American Erlang man, (wearing a meme garment saying “utterly terrifying”) wanted us to compare the Paul Valéry evolution steps with making software. The steps are two:

  • Gather Options (“combinations”)
  • Pick the fittest Option

“The Valéry Method” of programming. Mr Smith described it a little like a decision-making tool, for cool heads. I like this.

Garret also went into some basic genetics. He was a character.

Flow-Based Programming For JavaScript

Henri Bergius is a skilled entertainer, presenting flow-based system NoFlo many times a week. While the delivery is low-key, his enthusiasm is strong.

The KickStarter that created an editor for FlowHub

Henri being Bilbo

Cross-Platform Functional Programming With F#

Michal Lusiak of Tretton37 talked about F# – described the eco-system, the deployment situation. “I mostly build apps for iOS and Windows Phone.” He went on to list some greatest hits of the platform.

  • Pattern matching (“OCaml or Haskell people will say it’s stolen from them, and they are right.”)
  • Units of Measure
  • Type Providers, read up JSON into a statically-typed object you can intellisense on. “Dot-driven development”. Type Providers for SQL, for instance. “Strongly-typed SQL”. Traverse your Facebook friend tree.

Honza Kral on ElasticSearch

The search infrastructure ElasticSearch has many clients. They’re well made, and Honza Kral told us what quality work goes into them.

In summary:

Bonus: Word used today include knowledge worker, multimedia, weblog.

Published by olleolleolle

Olle is a programmer, enjoying sunny Malmö in Sweden.

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