The Portuguese team did a fantastic job with this year’s Perl conference YAPC::EU::2009 in Lisbon
just last week.
What I learnt
- Lots of companies — Cisco, Opera, the canton of Geneva, among others — are proud to use Perl.
- There is lots of work going on in the “Enlightened” Perl movement. Including ways to make deployment and packaging of Perl apps easier. You can join the EPI for a mere GBP 100/year (whether you’re UK based or not) and can pay by regular direct debit.
- Perl is “Alive and kicking, and stronger than ever”. (OK, that’s marketing speak.
But Barbie’s talk on the statistics of Perl
backs it up: for example there are between 30 and 50 new authors
uploading their first module to the CPAN every month!) - As always, the hallway track is one of the best parts of any conference -
the chance to meet up with old friends and colleagues, and make new contacts
with the very clever people in the
Perl community and find out what they’re doing.
Cool modules mentioned included:
- Moose, MooseX::Declare, etc.
- TryCatch
- XML::Pastor
- autodie
- autobox, and MooseX::Autobox
- Regexp::Grammars (very cool indeed, from the Damian – Perl6 like rules, in Perl 5)
Logistics
Joel++ booked a flat (via waytostay.com) for 5 of us. This was an
excellent idea, reasonably priced, and a beautiful flat, great for
socializing in. Highly recommended, especially for a group of
friends/colleagues.
Organizers
The Lisbon team did a fantastic job! Among their several innovations, were such delights as:
- Coffee/lunch all the time: this was very bare bones, but none the worse for it. There was food any time you wanted it, which meant that you never had to worry about leaving a talk late etc. This was especially useful given that the campus wasn’t right next to large restaurants. (But even in central venues, if 300 people go out to lunch, they will be gone for 2 hours, realistically).
- The Quizz show, hosted by Damian Conway at the conference dinner. (One of the orgas)++ had hacked some PS2 games controllers, and great fun was had by all.
(Me and Polettix came 2nd, but the important thing is that we answered a Buffy question first, to the horror of davorg and Greg). - Moderators in the auditorium (Wendy++ and Liz++).
- “Special” namebadges with an information booklet inside.
- sapo.pt sponsored a lovely chillout area with wonderfully comfortable beanbags.
They set a worryingly high standard especially as…
YAPC::EU::2010 will be in Pisa
I seem to have got myself involved in this… but it’s going to be great. Look forward to seeing you all there!
Functional Pe(a)rls and Foose
I gave the
version of my Functional Pe(a)rls talk, which went down quite well. Thanks
to everyone who showed up, especially for putting up with me being late…
I’ve been apologizing for some time for not having actually sat down and
released modules for all the techniques I’m playing with here. But James Laver
finally pestered me enough, and we’ve created a new project:
to Moose) which will aim to bring neatly packaged functional goodness to Perl.
(See also irc:irc.perl.org/#foose)
Moving on
I attended YAPC in the last week of employment with Thermeon Europe,
who kindly paid for my time there. It’s been a crazy 2 years (almost), and I’ll miss the guys there, but I’m
excited to be moving on to consulting, initially on some Perl development and documentation projects.
If you’re interested by anything you’ve read in this blog and would like to hire me, then please do get in touch ;-) I’m mainly interested in teleworking or contracts in Northwest UK, but happy to discuss!