YAPC::EU 2011 - day 3

The last day started with Jesse Vincent's "Perl 5.16 and Beyond". I was expecting the same talk as in Asheville (YAPC::NA), but it wasn't. He explained his plans for a traditional and minimal Perl. The traditional Perl would be like today (with all the core modules). The minimal one would just contain enough to get CPAN started. That is a great change! Also, some functionality (UNIX process functions, sockets, formats) could get extracted into modules. This would lead to a leaner Perl C source. I absolutely like this decision!

Next was Steven Jenkins (from Venda) with "Modern Perl - getting there from here". The abstract sounded better than the talk actually was. He talked about some problematic areas in the Venda code base and what they did about it. Unfortunately it contained almost no general advice.

After that, I attended Thomas Klausner's talk about text fixtures. He talked about file system and database fixtures and refactoring tests with own modules. For database fixtures he recommended transactions (and rollback).

Before the lunch break Matt S. Trout talked about Data::Query. He started with the history of DBIx::Class and later talked about Data::Query and the future integration into DBIC. There is already a 'dq' branch at SQL::Abstract. He mentioned Booking.com is still using a private Class::DBI fork. And I wrote down this quote: "Monkey patching is completely fair, if the line starts with 'local'." I like it! :)

In "I <3 my community" Mark Keating talked about last years London Perl Workshop and mentioned/thanked members of the Perl community.

Next was Clinton Gormley with "Terms of endearment - the ElasticSearch query language explained". He had a nice demo application we could try on his Laptop (also on GitHub). He compared (and explained) filters and queries.

Last talk before the lightning talks was Abigail with "The Business Aware Programmer". I did not attend this talk in Asheville, but I knew from a blog post that this talk was controversial. So I was looking forward to it (and indeed, Abigail could not finish in time because of upcoming discussions). I wrote down one quote from the audience: "Your crappy code makes smart people not want to work for booking.com", which sums up the disagreement nicely. If I find the tuits I will write a whole blog post about it, as some of his points are valid (but we developers want to believe otherwise).

The lightning talks included MetaCPAN.org, Net::DRI, White Camel Awards and Acme::ASM.

Matt was closing the conference with his "State of the Velociraptor" talk. This time it was almost the same talk as in Asheville. A few attendees brought the WebGUI octopus with them and threw it at mst again. Even Larry landed a shot. :)

Thanks to the organizers for a fantastic conference. Next years YAPC::EU will be in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.