Ask HN: What is the best developer conference talk you saw in 2011? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best developer conference talk you saw in 2011?

73 pointspuredanger29 comments

What is the best developer conference talk you saw (in person or on video) in 2011? What taught you or inspired you the most?

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Strangeloop - great speakers (including my favorite keynote in years by Rich Hickey http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy) and great variety (https://thestrangeloop.com/sessions). I'm also happy that all of the presentations will (eventually) be available on the web (https://thestrangeloop.com/news/strange-loop-2011-video-sche...).

I'll definitely be attending in 2012.

Strange Loop 2011, "We really don't know how to compute", Gerald Sussman (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/We-Really-Dont-Know-How-T...).

That's not entirely fair though, insofar as I'm a sucker for a Sussman talk.

Beyond that, I'd have to say Sam Aaron's Overtone presentation @ Clojure Conj 2011.

At the moment, it strikes me that the obvious common element of both talks and speakers are their absolutely infectious enthusiasm for their respective specialties.

Sam is a complete rock star. One of the few people I know who can get showstopper applause in the middle of a talk.

Sam crushed it. It felt like a TED talk. Hickey and Sussman at STLoop were both awesome, but Sam takes the cake. I hope the video goes up soon.

Being in Aus we don't get to see many live and rely on the videos being made available. Of those I particularly liked Daniel Spiewak's "Extreme Cleverness: Functional Data Structures" and Rich Hickey's "Simple Made Easy".

We were fortunate enough though to have the excellent YOW conference with many excellent talks, particular stand-outs coming from Simon Peyton-Jones and Mike Lee, but the absolute best talk (not necessarily the best tech, it is Perl after all) was Damian Conway's flabbergasting "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces...Made Easy!"[1]

[1] http://www.yowconference.com.au/YOW2011/general/workshopDeta...

Coincidentally I was asked I put together one of those "top 15 of 2011" lists for .NET magazine on more or less this topic, you might find these of interest: http://www.netmagazine.com/features/2011-review-15-web-confe...

"Extreme Cleverness: Functional Data Structures in Scala" at Strange Loop.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Functional-Data-Structure...

Strangeloop 2011 - Bryan O'Sullivan

Running a Startup On Haskell: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Running-a-Startup-on-Hask...

transcribed

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1eQiXRyStqCVVlp6cMuc...

Simple made Easy by Rich Hickey by several miles.

Also "Hammock Driven Development" by the same gentleman.

That's easy : Simple made easy by Rich Hickey

Video for "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Thanks for the link, and to the others, for the recommendation. What a great talk!

Theo Schlossnagle's "Career Development" (Velocity 2011 Keynote):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0mHo7SMCQk

One of the most inspiring talks I saw this year was Sarah Allen's talk about teaching programming to kids: "Easy as Pie" (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Easy-as-Pie-Teaching-Code...). A month later I found myself teaching my first programming class to kids and I'm hoping to do some more early next year.

Of course. Strange Loop 2011.

Glyph's keynote at Djangocon was hilarious and accurate. It also immediately sparked some wonderful and deep discussions about the future of Django.

http://blip.tv/djangocon/keynote-glyph-lefkowitz-5573264

Business of Software 2011 in Boston was great as usual. 300+ people that actually run software companies getting together to learn from each other. The most targeted conference for software entrepreneurs that I've seen.

Microconf 2011 by a few hundred country miles.

I have never had my head crushed by so much actionable info in 1-2 days. The entire conference was worth it by the time the first speaker had done his session and it kept getting better.

I'll second you on Microconf. Rob and Mike have announced they will be having a 2012 conference to. This conference focuses on individuals who want to create and run software companies without outside funding.

I third Microconf 2011. Great formal presentations and invaluable networking opportunities, too.

I'm looking forward to Microconf 2012.

Sounds cliche and possibly like I'm pandering to the HN crowd, but Startup School. I quote it constantly - almost on a daily basis. It wasnt way more about soft skills than actual code, of course, but I find that to be more important.

Also, my best advice at any conference is to take notes. I took comprehensive Startup School notes, and reviewed them later. I never would have gotten so much out of it if I hadn't.

I like Mike Lee's talk 'Product Engineering' at SL2011 http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Product-Engineering as well as DHH's Railsconf 2011 Keynote speech on Asset Pipeline.

Learnt quite a bit from these two talks.

There was a Ruby talk the guys at Nulayer did in Toronto that showed that Ruby can be nearly as fast as NodeJS. I wasn't fully convinced but I learned a ton of useful things.

Two of the lunchtime sessions at WWDC really inspired me as did much of the entire conference.

Morten Lunds talk at the Power of 1 conference in Battersea powerstation

Design in the Land of Sharp Pointy Technologies, at Twiliocon

I liked the WWDC talks and Chris Liscio's talk at Çingleton.

Chris' talk is available as a video http://lanyrd.com/2011/cingleton-symposium/smfww/

Josh Bloch's talks at Devoxx alone were worth the trip.

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