life after yapc

I’m happy to be home! YAPC was a good experience, although I think OSCON was on the whole better, for a number of reasons. Most of them, though, boil down to location. The other tracks at OSCON, of course, meant that there was always something I found really interesting, but I mostly stuck to the Perl track. There were more people at OSCON, but I didn’t have time to meet everyone at YAPC! Anyway, I’m glad I did YAPC, glad I’ll be doing OSCON, and hope to keep on doing both.

Gloria and I have been chilling out together, watching Farscape, and drinking tasty white tea. We also watched some Jeeves and Wooster, which is strange, but very good. It’s so… English!

I’m trying to keep my nose to the grindstone. Just as I did after OSCON, I’m feeling very motivated. I want a good portfolio. I want to solve good problems. I want to be known for being a useful member of the community. To this end, I’ve been working on a useless Acme::ProgressBar toy. Er!

Well, I’m also working on some other things. I’ve installed the new Kwiki, which looks totally awesome. I wrote a simple bit of code to format IRC-like blocks, and I’ll eventually make it better. I need to learn more about Spoon, Spiffy, and Spork. I wish they had POD. Ingy says, “POD may be premature optimization,” but I agreed with the dinner-table discussion from OSCON where it was said that “if the docs aren’t in the POD, they become radically devalued.”

Much love to statico, though, for producing examples for plugin-writing on new Kwiki Kwiki.

At work, I again considered rewriting MASH, but I’m just horrified at the idea of figuring out the right interface for everything it does. I need to identify the pieces that can be worked on one at a time. I wish I had more time to get things right at work. Or more people off of whom to bounce ideas. I haven’t heard back from the newly Perl-enabled developer in the UK for a while. I wonder what’s up.

I played a bit of Front Mission 4, this evening. It was totally awesome. The analog camera alone is an incredible improvement over FM3.

I’m going to stop writing now. More tomorrow.

Written on June 22, 2004