What a week for PLUG. After months of organisation, we were honoured by Rusty Russell flying to Perth for PLUG. He presented a talk entitled “Coding: lets have fun“, which showed the simplicity and beauty of a regular expression engine in around 20 lines of C, to a wireframe Flight Sim from a recent IOCCC where the code itself was formated in the outline of an aircraft, and then a dotted history of his experiences and where he has found joy in coding.
After a pizza dinner break for the 46 (or thereabouts) people present, Rusty was then corraled into a panel discussion with Dr Chris McDonald from UWA CompSci, and Assistant Professor Robert Cunningham from UWA Law for a chat on various topics; seems like cloud computing was on everyone’s thoughts.
The PLUG AV crew streamed this event live, and recorded it: videos of the talk (93 MB mp4) and the panel (115 MB mp4) are now available (both are around an hour and a quarter). Older videos are here.
Rusty was very generous in refusing to accept the collected funds for the expenses, so we have money now to repeat this exercise of flying in another speaker. It’s up to PLUGGers to try and decide who they would like to see next! Time-wise its likely to be Q2 next year as PLUG has a full schedule until then.
Big thanks to Chris, Robert and Rusty for speaking – they were all excellent. Also to Daniel Hamrsworth for co-ordinating tickets, the AV crew for their recording, and for everyone who put their hand in their pocket to help the event come together.