Last year and this year, I flew to St. Louis to attend Strange Loop. I’ve attended several conferences, a few hackathons, and plenty of local meetups throughout the past two years and Strange Loop is still my favorite developer event. It prides itself on being at the forefront of technology and on unifying industry with academia. Most talks are about functional programming, distributed systems, and new languages, but there are also a number of passion projects that wouldn’t fit neatly into a formal conference track.

The talks I’ve attended at Strange Loop have very little application in my daily life, and that’s really refreshing. Most of the time, I need to be practical about time management, so I prioritize what I learn based on whether it could help me at my current job, or whether it could help me become more employable in the future. When I’m at Strange Loop, all I care about is the rush of encountering something new and challenging.

One highlight from this year’s conference was Analyzing Rap Lyrics Using Python. Julie Lavoie wanted to see if she could write some code to determine which rappers were the most sexist in their songs. She explained natural language processing (NLP) concepts and told us how she tried to apply them to her project, as well as the hurdles she ran into. For example, text search relies on stemming, a process for putting words into a common form so that we don’t count verb conjugations and plurals as unique words. However, stemming libraries don’t support many slang terms used in rap lyrics, so Julie’s program needed to work around that by manually consolidating certain words. You can watch Julie’s talk on YouTube.

Another engaging talk from last year was Learnfun and Playfun: a Nintendo automation system. Tom Murphy found out that the NES stores the current point total in a memory location that he could easily access. He also knew that he could represent all possible game moves as a tree and then efficiently prune a branch when that move would lead to failure. Using this knowledge, he wrote a program that played NES games by guessing different moves and maximizing the total score. This technique worked very well for Mario, but less well for games that require advance planning. You can watch Tom’s talk on InfoQ.

Through its diversity in both speaker lineup and talk topics, Strange Loop provides unique opportunities for discovery. The social events are the perfect complement to this environment. For one night each year, the conference rents out City Museum, a 10-story museum filled with climbable art. When you arrive, you learn two things. First of all, the gift store sells knee pads, and unlike almost any other museum, you may find that useful. Second, the museum doesn’t provide maps so that you’re forced to explore on your own. Crawling through winding caves and gazing out at the sparkling city skyline from the rooftop are good ways to make friends with some of the hundreds of developers around you. And you do want to make friends, especially before you go down a 10-story slide and get too dizzy to walk in a straight line.

Strange Loop is different from any other industry event I’ve attended. The location and the people are both remarkable and allow me a chance to peek into lives far away from my own. I feel lucky to have accumulated so many fond memories there and I can’t wait to return to St. Louis next year.

If you want to learn more detail about the event or hear other perspectives, I highly recommend the dozens of blog posts linked from Strange Loop Coverage on GitHub.