I found out about StrangeLoop last year through random people (the coolest ones, obviously) raving about it on Twitter. When Bridget Hillyer announced on the DevChix list that this year's conference was offering a diversity scholarship program, I decided to apply. One of my personal goals for this year is to attend some conferences that aren't PyCon, if only out of intellectual curiosity and in the interest of expanding my horizons. StrangeLoop isn't a language-specific conference, although it seems to lean heavily toward functional programming at the moment (which I gather has not always been the case).
I felt weird asking for financial support when, as a gainfully employed software developer, I earn more now than I ever have in my entire life; but the costs of traveling and attending multiple conferences in a year add up quickly, and having to cover all of it would have meant I could not go to St. Louis. I included this info in my application, mostly to assuage my guilt in asking for financial aid when I knew others would need it much more than I did. I was amazed by the amount I was offered, and knew I had to make the most of the opportunity.
Before StrangeLoop, all I knew about Clojure, functional programming, and most of the other trending topics of StrangeLoop came from whatever floated up through Hacker News, and through tips thrown my way by like-minded coworkers. I wasn't sure what exactly my learning goals for this conference should be; perusing the schedule, I decided to aim for exposure to the widest possible variety of topics -- and yet it was still extremely difficult to pick which talk I wanted to see, for nearly every session. I was relieved to learn that all the talks would be taped, though it didn't make the choosing any easier!
I'm not in any communities that overlap with StrangeLoop's, so aside from one or two fellow Pythonistas I wouldn't really know many people at the conference. My employer is a PyCon sponsor and sends my whole dev team to that conference every year; I also know people through the SoCal Python community and PyLadies, so PyCon always feels like a happy reunion with 2000 friends. Here, I'd be on my own.
How great, then, was it for Strange Loop to offer conference guides for first-time attendees? We got to attend a special lunch on the first day of conference, and it was a good way to meet people, including fellow n00bs, in a less-intimidating environment.
The StrangeLoop program is like a bazaar, and it leads you to wonder what the purpose of programming is. Several of the talks I attended alluded to the early days of computer science, and I learned a few things about a great many languages, including ones I hadn't ever heard of (Agda? Racket? miniKanren?). My Instapaper queue grew exponentially from all the academic papers cited; my brain was pretty much fried by the end of day one, after talks about dynamic programming in C, static signal graphs as used by Elm, and especially after Stephen Wolfram hijacked his own Q&A to wax philosophical on language design (aside: that should've been his real keynote).
I realized early on that there wasn't going to be much here that I'd be able to use in my day-to-day work, necessarily. My job doesn't really require the kind of heroic coding that so many people presented. But I gained new perspectives on languages (including some interesting thoughts about interoperability between languages), data structures, and programming philosophies. I'm inspired to be more thoughtful in the way I approach programming, and it was kind of invigorating to have my mind racing continuously for two days as I tried to catch up with other peoples' knowledge while processing a million new ideas. I'm definitely eager to dive into the talks I missed, and to get into FP in a much bigger way than I have been previously.
Of course, meeting people is the other great benefit of attending a conference. I enjoyed nice conversations with new friends over sandwiches, frozen custard and chicken BBQ, not to mention at the pre-conference party at the insanely awesome City Museum, which was such an amazing experience that I went back on the last night of my trip. I even made friends on my way to the airport, StrangeLoopers being somewhat easy to identify even sans conference badges ;) More than once, people remarked that the most interesting people they'd talked to were the ones who'd come on the diversity scholarship. It's clear that making the extra effort to invite those who normally never would or could attend is the surest way to draw new talent, and our collective experience is made better for it.
There's still a long way to go in terms of "achieving" diversity: there were still a LOT more men, and not enough women, and not nearly enough people of color, sitting in the theater most of the time. I'm told that overall diversity was still much greater this year than it was last year. The speaker lineup was great, which speaks highly of the conference organizers' efforts in that area as well.
On the second day I had breakfast at the hotel with two women I'd met the day before, and as we were leaving one of the bussers (a man) said this to us: "It's nice to see so many ladies in the field of Science." LOL
Thanks a million to Bridget and the organizers of StrangeLoop for offering the diversity scholarship program - for making such splendid efforts to increase the overall diversity of the conference . It was a novel, brilliant experience for me and undoubtedly for so many others who would have otherwised missed out, and I hope many more get to partake in the future.