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I spent part of this week with Hilary Mason, one of the smartest people that I know in Big Data. She works as the Chief Scientist for Bit.ly and has a wealth of skills at her fingertips that bridge computer science and mathematics. Plus, she is used to facing largely male audiences and just being the smartest person in the room. She was speaking at The Strange Loop conference in St. Louis this week, which should definitely be on your radar for next year if you are interested in this topic or want to broaden your programming skills.

Mike Lee has been involved in what are arguably some of the software industry's best applications. Delicious Library, Tap Tap Revenge, the Obama '08 app, and Apple's mobile store. Lee has a pretty good idea what users want, and spent about an hour at the St. Louis Strange Loop 2011 conference talking about product engineering and why it's best to imagine users as lazy, stupid, impatient and selfish. Did I mention he was wearing a Mariachi outfit?

One key to a good or great talk? Having a good "hook," to interest the audience. Ian Robinson decided that a good way to grab audience attention yesterday at the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis was to use Doctor Who to talk about the Neo4j graph database. He's not wrong.

What could have been an extremely dry and boring presentation was fairly lively. Robinson started with a quick overview of Doctor Who, just in case the audience wasn't familiar with the show. I don't think he needed to have worried, given the demographic.

Keynotes are often viewed skeptically by technical audiences. Far too often conference keynotes are all style and no substance. Larger conferences can be worse – where keynotes are pay to play and audiences are expected to sit through glorified sales pitches. The Strange Loop conference today in St. Louis, Missouri avoided that problem pretty nicely today with its morning keynote by Erik Meijer, "Category Theory, Monads, and Duality in (Big) Data."

Meijer, is an architect in Microsoft's SQL Server division. He was previously an associate professor at Utrecht University, and an adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate institute. No doubt, he's been spending plenty of time thinking about the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases lately.

I spent part of this week with Hilary Mason, one of the smartest people that I know in Big Data. She works as the Chief Scientist for Bit.ly and has a wealth of skills at her fingertips that bridge computer science and mathematics. Plus, she is used to facing largely male audiences and just being the smartest person in the room. She was speaking at The Strange Loop conference in St. Louis this week, which should definitely be on your radar for next year if you are interested in this topic or want to broaden your programming skills.