Announcements: The Abstractions Conference: Pittsburgh

Back when we were setting up The Daily WTF: Live, I gave a shout-out to the Pittsburgh tech community group, Code & Supply. They've been a great way to network with local developers, dev-opsers, designers, and more, ranging from the seasoned vets to those just cutting their teeth on IT. I'm a huge fan of their events, and I only wish I could make it to more of them.

But there's one event I'm not going to miss, and if you can get to Pittsburgh, you shouldn't miss it either. Code & Supply is launching their new conference, Abstractions. Abstractions, like Code & Supply, is a cross-techology, multi-skillset event, dedicated to bringing some of the best speakers in a variety of technologies together for one of the best conference lineups I've seen.

I'm just going to give you a taste of some of the big names:

• Mitchell Hashimoto, CEO of Hashicorp (makers of Vagrant, Otto, and other automation tools).
• Allison Randall, leader on projects including Perl, Python, Ubuntu, and more.
• Oh, did I mention Perl? Larry Wall will be there.
• Speaking of programming language inventors, Joe Armstrong (Erlang), and Josi(C) Valim (Elixir).
• Make sure to bring a laptop running Free-as-in-Speech software, or suffer the wrath of Richard Stallman
• Douglas Crockford, author of Javascript: The Good Parts and inventor of JSON
• Scott Hanselman, from Microsoft's Web Platform Team
• Eileen Uchitelle, from the Ruby on Rails Core Team

Maybe that was more of a nibble than a taste, but it's a great list of top-tier presenters. I am excited to see this kind of crowd coming into Pittsburgh, and I'm looking forward to attending this conference- this incredibly affordable conference. This is a three day conference which costs $250, and they'll also be offering scholarships and sending out a call-for-proposals. The conference runs from August 18-20, at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, and tickets can be punchased through Abstractions.io. I will be there as an attendee (and possibly a few other members of our TDWTF staff as well) with a backpack full of buttons and stickers for site fans. If you plan to attend, drop a line to our inbox. If enough readers are in the area that weekend, we'll arrange a reader meetup outside of conference hours one evening.

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