pittsburgh perl workshop: it's over
Well, I’m in the back seat of Walt’s car, and I’m tired. We’re in central Pennsylvania, cruising east toward the Lehigh Valley. I think the workshop went very well, both as a whole and as far as my participation. I’m definitely looking forward to PPW 2008.
I gave three presentations, all of which will be up on SlideShare as soon as I’ve got a reliable network connection. They went well, even though I really didn’t have them done as far in advance as I had wanted. On Saturday, I gave my talk on Sub::Exporter. It was the third time I’ve given it, and once again I think it was mostly well received. Before I give it again, I’d like to go through it and reduce the amount of code that needs to be followed at any one time. I think that I won’t be able to greatly reduce the amount of code, but there are some places where too much code must be understood at once for a single point to be made, the way things are right now.
Today, I spoke about App::Cmd, and that talk was alright, although I think it can definitely be improved. In fact, I think that as App::Cmd matures a bit, the refinements likely to make it into App::Cmd will be the things I’ll want to show in the talk. Still, a few people seemed excited by the module, which was great. I really like it, too, and it’s nice to see that other people might get some mileage out of it.
I also spoke about Perl 5.10, running through some of the less esoteric new features. I was trying to point out how they could make a real difference for even light users of the language, and I think I managed to create some more interest. Perl got big applause for the explanation of given/when, and a few other features got some murmurs of excitement.
I attended a few talks, when not working on slides, and I picked up a few cool things. Kirsten Jones’ talk on OpenID led me to find out how easy it is to establish an OpenID at my own domain; I wrote about this in a previous entry, but I’m still excited, and looking forward to using my OpenID at more places in the future.
I saw Schwern’s talk on SVK, which was cool, but… well, SVK and I had a number of fallings out over the last few years, and now I’m strictly a git man.
Stevan gave two talks on Moose (one was an intro, the other was on roles), and they were both very good. I enjoy Stevan’s talks, because they always seem very relaxed, and move at a good steady pace, which is difficult given the complexity of the material he covers. Once again, I ended up looking forward to having a reason to use more Moose. I don’t think I’m ready, yet, to go out of my way to have one, though.
I missed Walt Mankowski’s talk on one-liners, which I’d hoped to see, but I did get to John’s talk on application deployment (and the yet-mostly-unwritten App::Deploy), which was good, although of course I was familiar with the material from working a bit with him on the material. I did, at least, get to Walt’s talk on natural language processing with Perl, which had some interesting bits. LinkParser and WordNet seemed interesting, though I have no idea why I’d use them. He also mentioned Acme::Lingua::EN::Inflect::Modern, and I always give point’s to author’s who mention my module’s.
Allison Randal gave a talk on Parrot and PIR, which once again made me long for a reason to mess around with Parrot. (I think I’m much more likely to start screwing around with Parrot than Moose, in the near future.) Maybe I’ll get around to making the cPP language I described at YAPC work.
I didn’t spend as much time networking in the “hallway track” as I sometimes have, but that was fine. I did meet some new people and catch up with some folks I knew. Hopefully I’ll hear some more from them – especially if they want to help improve the modules that I talked about!
The social events were hard for me to enjoy, because I was often preoccupied or tired, and John and I left most of them fairly early to get back to work on slides or sleep. We still made time to play five or six games of Zombie Fluxx, though, which was great fun.
It was a good conference, and I look forward to my next one. At the same time, though, I’m glad that won’t be for another nine months or so. I need some time without slide-making looming over me!