YAPC::EU 2011 - day 1

Actually, it's already day 3, but I want to keep the chronological order... :)

The main conference started with Larry's keynote. He showed some pictures of Riga and talked about (post)modern Perl.

I attended Carl Maesak's "How not to screw up your business application" next, which was about CQRS (command-query responsibility separation). The basic message was "it is okay to use more than one model" (a normalized one for writing and an denormalized/optimized one for reading).

After that Mallory von Achterberg talked about "HTML5: What it is, what it isn't, and should you use it?". Unfortunately, she could not show all the slides. Eye-opening was the counter until the HTML 5 spec is official, which showed over 3 years left.

Next was Carl Maesak again, with "Making data dance". He talked about the dancing links algorithm from Donald Knuth.

After the lunch break (we got free food at the venue), I attended Jonathon Worthington's "Rakudo Evolved: speed, feedback and hackability", which was about the Rakudo nom branch.

Chisel Wright's "Mostly lazy DBIx::Class testing" showed Test::DBIx::Class::Schema. He also uses Test::Aggregate to avoid the slow schema for every test file.

Next was Zefram with "why time is difficult". He talked about different time systems leading to UTC (coordinated universal time). He must be very interested in this topic as he could answer a lot of questions from the audience.

I missed the next slot, so next were the lightning talks. I just want to mention a few:

• Leon Timmermann "Reinventing Build.PL" (throw away Module::Build)
• Peter Rabbitson "Way Too Far Down The Memory Lane" (Sub::Name in pure Perl)
• Dave Cross "The Perl Community - A Modest Proposal" (Perl Masons and the first rule of Perl Club - funny)
  

After the lightning talks was the auction. It was not as funny as in last YAPC's, when there were more fun items and competition between the auctioneers. The day ended with dinner in Riga's old city.