BarCamp and Strange Loop

It’s been a while since our last Cell Zero update, and we’ve been very busy!

BarCamp GR

Cell Zero (along with several other Atoms) attended BarCamp GR on Aug 26th and 27th. BarCamp describes itself as “an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment”. The conference has no pre-planned sessions and instead encourages all participants to sign up for a time slot and give a short presentation.

Rachael Miller and Andy Peterson both gave presentations! Andy gave a talk titled “Please Don’t Make Me Think” based on some of his favorite lessons learned from the book of the same name. Rachael had a packed room for her “Interacting with 3D environments in a post-VR world” talk. I even got in on the fun and gave a presentation to a very attentive crowd of three for my talk “Feedback, FTW”.

Enjoying a drink at Gravity after the conference.

I really enjoyed BarCamp. It was a great networking opportunity as the time slots are short and there was plenty of time between sessions. We had great food thanks to generous sponsors (thanks Atomic!) and I thought the inclusive approach towards speakers was a fun change from the usual.

Strange Loop

We also attended Strange Loop from 9/14-9/18 along with 9 other Atoms. The group flew down together on Wednesday afternoon, and had some extra adventure on the train ride from the airport to our hotel.

 

We spent our first day at the Elm Conference. This was a really cool thing to be part of – it was the first conference ever for the Elm community and we got to hear from a number of great speakers including Evan Czaplicki, the Elm designer. We particularly liked the “Making impossible States Impossible” talk by Richard Feldman and Evan’s “Code is the Easy Part” keynote.

The Strange Loop conference itself kicked off on Friday. I was very impressed by the “Humanities x Technology” keynote by Ashley Nelson-Hornstein. The “African Polyphony & Polyrhythm” talk by Chris Ford and the “Languages for 3D Industrial Knitting” presentation by Lea Albaugh were also big hits.

Everyone appreciated the opportunity to spend some time together away from work, enjoy good food and drinks together, and get inspired by some big new ideas. Strange Loop was a huge success.

In Other News

  • Cell Zero prepared for our big trip by diving into some Elm programming. We got together over the weekend prior to the conference to learn the basics of the language and work on building out some front-end applications. Andy Peterson seems to be particularly bitten by the Elm bug now.
  • Cell Zero has also been reading through Uncle Bob’s Clean Code book, discussing the principles he lays out, and how best to apply them to our project work.
  • Mike Swieton was gracious enough to be our guest speaker on 9/23. He spoke with the Cell about best practices when working with SQL and database design.