Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's down to Asheville we go

June 5th, 2011
PerlYAPC::NA

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s down to Asheville we go

Thanks to Pythian’s philosophy of keeping their employees on the bleeding edge of technology, at the end of this month I’ll be crossing the American borders for the first time in many years and will land in Asheville, North Carolina to join the YAPC::NA festivities. It’s been ages since I attended a major conference (the last time was, oh gawd, the Opnet conference of 2002?), and this will be my first YAPC ever. Am I thrilled? Ooooh heck yeah, I sure am.

Last week, I looked at the list of talks and went through the difficult process of dividing them into two groups: talks that I want to see, and talks that I really, really, want to see. With that painful exercise done, here is what my own personal schedule tentatively looks like:

Monday, June 27th

Because going to YAPC without attending a Larry Wall keynote is like going to Disneyworld and not have your picture taken with Mickey.

Another must-attend of any YAPC. Fast and furious machine-gun-quick talks, the way we like it.

I’ve always been a big fan of Damian Conway’s Perl Best Practices. It’s still a wonderful tome of wisdom but, of course, some things change. The popularity of the inside out OO systems waned, and Moose took the Perl world by storm. Some modules, very promising at the time, slowly sank in the tar pit of stagnation. To have an update of what is deemed to be best of breed and best of creed in 2011 can be nothing but refreshing.

In which gphat, bless his heart, will altruistically share all the mistakes he made during his eCommerce adventures, so that we, strong of his experience, sidestep them all and jump straight to the more involved and subtle ones.

Although I do have a water cooler, and I don’t currently telecommute, this is such an integral part of the ronin hacker’s way of life that it could hardly be missed.

Simply because l33t coding is only half the battle.

Tuesday, June 28th

To get a distribution from here to there is often more hairy than to write the darn said distribution in the first place. Hopefully, this talk will show us how bright, shiny and unicorn-paved the future is for us who need to lob around modules like crazed tennis-ball machines.

Event-based programmation is something that I only touched a few times. Still, this is something that, sooner or later, we all need to whip out of our toolbox.

Perl success story. About a website. Inspiration.

Because is B5 is not there anymore, DBIx::Class is our last best chance for sane database interaction.

That should throw some wicked lights on how well Perl can scale to massive loads.

Probably going to be even faster and furiouser than the ones of the day before.

Wednesday, June 29th

Heard about it, never had the opportunity to play with it. Golden opportunity to see what this baby has to offer.

Because if Stevan Little is its daddy and it sports antlers, it’s bound to be awesome.

Testing is good. PSGI on the rise. Learning how to test with PSGI? Probably a very good idea.

I’m all jitter-buggy and can’t wait to see that talk about that Dancer thing everybody rave about. ;-)

Blood bath!

Havta catch’em all.

At which point I expect my neurons to be overheated from all the information soaking of the previous 72 hours.

around conference => sub { ... }

I’m supposed to land on Sunday, and take off on Thursday, somewhat later during the day. I already have a short list of folks to meet during the events (hi Tommy!), and something tells me that this list is going to grow some more before I board my plane. In that regard, if for whatever reason you’ll be there and want to meet, feel free to poke me. Or just play “hunt the Yenzie” directly on site. :-)