YAPC::NA 2011 - day 2

Tuesday started with RJBS's "Perl 5.14 for pragmatists". Stable perl releases can now be expected every year. He warned about the usage of "given/when" and smartmatching, followed by all the changes of 5.14. Biggest features in my opinion: \r regex modifier, each on arrayrefs, built-ins on references (push, keys, ...) and new core modules like HTTP::Tiny and JSON::PP.

Later he explained his reasons for avoiding smartmatching (directly from my notes):

• operands define semantics (everywhere else the operator)
• 27 different possibilities
• applied recursive
• wicked complicated

And for given/when:

• uses smartmatch implicitely
• except in 8 cases

The next talk was Jesse Vincent with "Perl 5.16 and beyond". It was a look into the future of Perl 5.

After the lunch break it was time for me. I talked about "Sanitizing HTML 5 with Perl 5", which is about HTML5::Sanitizer. It was my second international talk (last year I talked about "Graphic visualization") and I was pleased with it (I didn't like my performance last year). There are lots of things I can do better, but at least I see a progression. :)

Then I hopped into "Practical AnyEvent", which started parallel to my talk. Stephen showed some AnyEvent examples. And I noted "never run recv on a condvar, use a callback ($cv->cb) and call recv in there", which sounds like a solution to a problem we have in Beetle. But I have to check that, when I'm back in the office.

Next was Rocco Caputo with Reflex. Reflex is the "ORM of event loops" or "reactive programm building blocks". It looked really nice, I have it on my list of things to try out.

I didn't make any notes about the content gaps talk, there was not much Perl in it, at all.

And the day ended with lightning talks:

• Vala (static typed OO language, for Gtk)
• Selenium (with Perl)
• grokbase.com (mailing list archive)
• Template Toolkit usage mistakes (not using caching)
• carton (dependency installation in local directory)
• CPAN modules from far east
• Furl (fast HTTP client)
• Server::Starter (hot deployable network server)
• SQL::Maker (cleaner internals than SQL::Abstract)
• Test::mysqld (start/stop MySQL server for testing, automatic cleanup)
• beware the brilliant programmer (more focus on maintenance programming
• Perl events
• fat comma (constants cause problems with fat comma, Abigail proposes ,=>)
• Devel's REPL (mst talked about Eval::WithLexicals)

YAPC::NA 2011 - day 1

Actually it is already the morning of day 3, so I'm a little bit behind. :)

The first day started with Larry's keynote. He wore mst's "Perl is my community" t-shirt, which was auctioned off at last YAPC::EU in Pisa. Larry talked about the community and at the end he had some nice slides about the "renaming Perl [56]" questions. He is against renaming them.

Next were the lightning talks: Jan Dubious presented ActiveState's Stackato. Other talks were about App::GitGot (manage git repositories), Mojolicious::Plugin::Toto, Template::Simple, Sol Genomics Network,Threads::TBB (Thread Building Blocks), logging of SQL queries, OWASP Top 10, cpandoc and Pittsburgh Perl Workshop (with "Perl Ops" track).

After the lunch break Jacinta Richardson talked about Perl Best Practices in 2011, a renewal of Damian Conway's book "Perl Best Practices". She had a tough start, because the room was not ready. Later in her talk one guest was sleeping and snoaring. :)

This doesn't mean the talk was bad, I really liked it. I made a lot of notes, too much to publish them here. :)

Next was Cory "gphat" Watson with "How to NOT built a multi-million dollar eCommerce system". He talked about his experiences from magazines.com. They had a very old code base, a custom written web framework, not even using CGI.pm. This sounds awefully familiar to me. Not even using CGI.pm!

This talk was also very good and it contained a lot of valueable information.

Next talks were about telecommuting and running a Perl event.

The evening was followed by the conference dinner and the auction. It was again in the "competition" style like it was first done in Pisa. Three teams auction off some items and compete about the highest bids. One of the items was an inflatable penguin. :)

y Jacinta Richardson (‎jaric

y Jacinta Richardson (‎jaric

y Jacinta Richardson (‎jaric

y Jacinta Richardson (‎jaric

Jacinta Richardson

Jacinta Richardson

YAPC::NA 2011 - day 0

After 18 hours of travel (flying Hamburg - Frankfurt - Charlotte - Asheville) I finally arrived at the conference hotel. Tomorrow at 9:30 start the talks. My talk is on Tuesday.

Note to myself: At Denny's a normal cheeseburger is enough. (I choose the "Double Cheeseburger" and couldn't finish it.) I have never seen such a tall burger. :)