Sycl24
I went to the Software You can Love conference, not for work but because I wanted to. I enjoyed it quite a bit, its subtitle is “celebrate the art of creating software for humans” and I think it fits. The idea behing it is expressed quite well in The Idealism and Practicality of Software You Can Love - Loris Cro - Software You Can Love 2022.
I didn’t only receive a nice programmable badge, but I got to hear several very interesting talks.
In the first day there were some lightting talks, some that I especially liked were King Butcher’s talk on Compressing Compression, he clearly explained modern compressors and the ideas behing it, I always liked zstd, having seen how well it performed for compressing our data in the NOMAD CoE, but I never looked at how it worked exactly. Now I know hot the hoffman tree coding is somewhat similar to continuos fraction representation, but using tables one avoids divisions, and it is still possible to use less than a bit for the more common entries.
I found the data language ziggy-lang.io interesting, it is modeled after zig: types can be expressed like in QML by putting the type name before the {}.
With my work hat I found interesting
- Julien Bisconti presenting lingon, which has an excellent infrastructure as code comparison
- Alex Garnett presenting Durable execution and the interface provided by temporal.io,
- Andres Villegas showing how the symbolizer markup from llvm allows offline symbolization
The longer talks were really worth it, and have a small description in the agenda.
I got questions on how to best learn low level system programming, and thinking about it discovered the classical Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach of John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson branched out into Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface with ARM and RISC-V versions and not only MIPS. Other cited computerenhance.com.
All in all a nice experience that I plan to repeat (maybe presenting something next time).