I hope to be able to pay an honorarium and travel bonus to speakers although that is dependent on conference registration and sponsorship levels.

I have already had several excellent speakers informally suggest some great talks so I have great hopes that we will have an amazing program.

Here’s a handy PDF of the speaker info as well:  Call for Presentations

I feel ever so mortal these days and I don’t want to waste my time – I want to choose how to spend my time and invest it as wisely as possible. For me that means first spending time with my kids (who are all young) and second building awesome stuff. One of my favorite tweets ever from Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) is:

“it’s better to be safe than sorry” is such crap. You know what’s better than being safe? Being AWESOME.

Heck yeah. Screw sorry. Screw safe. Embrace AWESOME. I know with absolute certainty that Strange Loop is going to be awesome and I hope you can all join me in making it so.

• Woot.com – Many people check woot.com as their first web hit of the day to see what low-priced item they’re offering. I’ve recently discovered the shirt.woot.com site as well which has cool stuff. Little did I know that woot.com has an office right here in south St. Louis city! I’m very pleased to have them as our first Strange Quark (highest-level) sponsor.
• Microsoft – You may have heard of this Redmond, WA-based startup. Turns out they also have a bunch of great folks that help to support local developer communities. Microsoft has signed up as the first Top Quark (second-level) sponsor.

Additionally, I opened registration and so far 8 people have registered. I wasn’t really expecting many people registering at this phase as we haven’t even sent out a call for presentations yet, much less chosen talks. However, apparently the draw of Alex Payne, Twitter API Lead, as the keynote was enough for some people. Of those 8 people, 5 are from St. Louis, 2 are from Kansas City, and 1 is from Turkey!! It’s great to see interest outside St. Louis. While my primary goal is to bring together St. Louis developers in the university, startup, and corporate worlds, I’m also very excited to be able to bring people in from outside St. Louis.

I’ve started working on technical discussions with the Tivoli on actually putting together the conference and while there are some challenges, I’m confident that we will have them worked out in plenty of time. I spent a bit of time behind the scenes at the Tivoli and got to meet the two sister cats that live there behind closed doors.

Other exciting news in the loop is the opening last week of the new Moonrise Hotel! If you happen to be flying in for Strange Loop, there could not be a more perfect place for you to stay. The hotel is beautiful, right by the Metrolink, and 1 block from the Tivoli and the conference. That makes it easy for you to fly into the airport, take the Metrolink right to University City, walk less than a block to the hotel, and avoid any driving or car rental. You can also take the Metrolink to other points of interest like the Central West End shopping/entertainment area, downtown to see the Arch, Laclede’s Landing, etc. As we get closer, I plan to reserve a block of rooms at a lower rate at the hotel. More on that later this summer.

I’ve got lots of fun ideas that I’d love to get to and I hope at least some of them will come to fruition. It’s awesome to see this conference move from idea to reality.

For ticket registration I’m using a local St. Louis startup called Busy Event. There are a bunch of services out there that can provide ticketing services but Busy Event is trying to forge a new low-cost, high-value path. Currently their Express product is in beta and available for free, which is quite a bargain. The management web site lets you set up a web page, do registration surveys, see reports, etc. They also can provide on-site support for day-of ticketing, badges, and more. They have some new products coming out soon that will make those day-of services easier to do yourself.

Register now!

Now that I’ve announced Strange Loop, I noticed on Twitter that someone scarfed up the date and put it in a site called EditConf, which is exactly what I was looking for. A cool site that does one thing well.

In the last week or so I’ve: formed an LLC, gotten an EIN tax number from the feds, opened a bank account, created a gmail account, opened a Paypal account, signed up a web host, written a first web site, opened a blog, opened a Google group, started a Twitter account, and found a keynote speaker. Setting up an entire new online persona is hard! I’m glad I don’t do this all the time.

I got confirmation today that Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, has agreed to be the keynote speaker for the Strange Loop conference! I am so excited that he was interested and able to do it, and especially willing to commit before the conference had its legs under it.

At this point, I am focused on getting the conference visible enough that I can start talking to sponsors. As a first conference, I am personally footing the bill for everything until I can get either some sponsorship money or early registrations. There is a delicate timing balance between committing money for various aspects and bringing money in and I’m trying to strike that balance.

If you have ideas, suggestions, questions, whatever, the best place to discuss that is in the Google Group – that’s where everyone can share the same discussion and I will monitor it closely.

The location is the Loop.  If you live in St. Louis, then you know the Loop.  It’s near Washington University and Wash U has slowly bought a large percentage of the property in the area to use for student housing.  The canonical loop denizen is a little funky, with some style and quite often an accompanying dog, skateboard, mohawk, or tattoo.  The loop is just a matter of a few blocks on Delmar that Joe Edwards keeps stretching farther east towards the MetroLink stop.  It’s the home of the famous Blueberry Hill, where Chuck Berry still plays once a month or so.  For me, I grew up going to the loop to see movies at the Tivoli, hearing bands at Blueberry Hill or Cicero’s, or in more recent years The Pageant, and buying CDs at Vintage Vinyl, one of the few remaining independent record stores.  In short, it’s a wonderful young place to hang out.

And I envision getting my community together there in this setting, at this time.  I’ve grown up and lived in St. Louis most of my life and my roots here are deep.  I am also a software developer.  I care a lot about the software development community in St. Louis because this is where I live and what I do and I want this to be a great place to be a software developer.  So I envision the many many talented developers in St. Louis and the area getting together, in the fall, in the Loop to have a conference.

Thus was born the Strange Loop Conference.

Two weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and dive into planning a software development conference, which I have named the Strange Loop Conference.  The conference will be a one day event, held on a Friday in October (exact date still TBD but likely 10/16 or 10/23).  It will be held at the Tivoli in the heart of the loop.  The Tivoli is a beautiful old theater – it has one main theater that holds 450 people and two side theaters that hold 150 each, allowing three concurrent tracks.

This blog will be the meta blog of the conference, your peek to the inside of what planning a conference is like (as I figure it out myself).  The name of the conference comes from Douglas Hofstadter, author of the book “I Am A Strange Loop” and more famously “Godel, Escher, Bach”.  The idea of a strange loop is a shifting between levels of a hierarchy of abstraction in such a way that can give rise to meaning.  Hofstadter argues that this concept of a strange loop actually gives rise to consciousness in the human brain.  For me, there is an obvious tie-in with the location of the Loop and I want to create something that’s a little strange.  I also want the conference to help build a stronger developer community in St. Louis with a sense of identity.

At this point, I don’t yet have a web site to point you towards or even much more hard detail.  That’s all on the way in the near future.  In the last week I incorporated Strange Loop LLC (thanks to the handy online registration), filed for a federal EIN (also online), and opened a business bank account.  Those are all necesary first steps along the way.  Locking down the date, location, and a web site are next priorities. Coming soon…