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Ben Saunders
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Mon, 03 Jul 2006
YAPC::NA 2006 Interesting Links
My list of interesting presentations, projects, and people at YAPC::NA 2006:
- Thoughtstream
Damian Conway's site - if you want to hear him speak, the information is here.
- use Perl: Artistic License 2.0 Release
Getting all the Perl/Parrot/Pugs legal ducks in a row.
- O'Reilly Radar: A Week in Chicago with Rails, Perl, and Django
Someone at O'Reilly finally acknowledges YAPC::NA, but it's still not on perl.com.
- YAPC Presentation Slides
The slides for all of the YAPC::NA presentations ultimately should be linked here.
- Jifty Web Application Framework
This web application framework both easy to setup and powerful.
- www.jrock.us - Catalyst app for blogging
Interesting presentation on a Catalyst app for blogging
- Prototype.js Documentation List
AJAX was a big focus at the conference; Prototype.js helps you deal with the 'J' part.
- Plagger: DIY RSS/Atom aggregation
Application to aggregate RSS feeds into websites, e-mail, etc. Nat Torkington says: "genius."
Posted at 15:36 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Perl Best Practices Master Class Day 2
I somehow forgot to talk about the final day of the conference! The only bad thing about Damian's presentations is that they end. Things got a little complicated for Damian when he realized his computer wouldn't connect to the projector anymore, but he handled it well. (Unfortunately, it did look like a trip to the Apple Store for a new computer.) I really wanted to hear his rationale behind inside-out objects, but that ended up being the one topic we didn't get to cover. He did mention a couple of new modules to help with that, however, so maybe I'll be able to learn more by looking at those.
The conference was awesome! I might try to write a whole summary later, but I learned so much and met so many people, that might take a while. But the list of YAPC links I set up should suffice for now.
Posted at 15:31 [/tech/yapcna2006] (1 comments) permalink
Fri, 30 Jun 2006
Perl Best Practices Master Class Day 1
Day 1 of the "Perl Best Practices" master class with Damian Conway was great. Though he is generally covering material in his book, not everything covered in class is in the book. And the opportunity to discuss the material with Damian himself? Priceless.
Posted at 01:35 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Thu, 29 Jun 2006
So the final day of the main YAPC::NA conference comes to a close. I am really glad to be enrolled in the master classes for the next two days, because the last 3 days have been excellent. I've learned so much information about so many different Perl technologies. Plus, the fellowship amongst the community of Perl developers is nothing short of amazing. It is no wonder that the Perl community is capable of such amazing things with such a supportive community of volunteers behind it.
For me today's conference highlight was probably the Lightning Talks. Several presenters were informative (XML::Liberal [PDF]), many were hilarious (SSV: The Prison Years), a couple were somehow both.
Damian Conway's keynote was fascinating, as his presentations always are. Still, I don't think I'll be programming Perl in Latin for production work.
After all that, a couple of us were deciding what to do for food after the sessions today and ended up crashing the Speaker's Dinner. I met even more people I hadn't met earlier, and also caught up with a friend I hadn't talked to in awhile. I also played a couple of hands of Texas Hold 'Em (badly). A perfect cap to a great three days.
Posted at 05:56 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Wed, 28 Jun 2006
YAPC::NA 2006 continues to be a great experience. I learned a lot of information and talked to many interesting people.
Larry Wall and Damian Conway's "Perl 6 Update" was, well, interesting doesn't quite describe it. There is definitely going to be some really great things in Perl 6. There will be a lot of syntactic sugar that will make a lot of mundane things really easy. I still think there will be some of what I've taken to calling syntactic saccharin because although it looks cool at first, in the long term it will give you cancer. The use of the "French quotes" is an example of this.
Web frameworks are all the rage these days, and there is no shortage of them written in Perl. I attended a couple of talks about Catalyst, an introduction to a new framework called Solstice, and Jesse Vincent's presentation on Jifty. Catalyst apparently remains difficult to install, though a couple of people are working on fixing that. After attending the different talks, my impression is that for ease of use, consistency, and coolness, Jifty gets the nod.
"Subversion Best Practices" with Ben Collins-Sussman was a great presentation and answered a lot of questions I had about deploying Subversion. I now feel confident that I can completely replace CVS with Subversion and not have any major problems.
Plagger is very cool piece of tech. I actually have written a couple of utilities to aggregate RSS feeds to create websites (like Transformed Planet), so I was surprised that there was a project like Plagger on the 'Net. Tatsuhiko Miyagawa explained that Plagger's English-language documentation was still a bit poor and it has had limited exposure as a result. I really enjoyed his presentation and was surprised at how far he had taken the concept of building websites from different RSS feeds (planet.yapcchicago.org is only one example). I want to know more about this project; the concept is very powerful and Tatsuhiko has several ideas for increasing functionality even more.
Posted at 12:26 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Phoenix.pm's own Scott Walters—aka scrottie—won the auction for Larry Wall action figure.
Posted at 01:06 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
The Man, the Myth, the Action Figure - Larry Wall
Larry graciously poses with his action figure at the YAPC::NA 2006 fundraising auction. The action figure has 7 posable parts and comes with Perl book and fanny pack!
Posted at 01:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Tue, 27 Jun 2006
The first day of the conference was excellent. I heard about a lot of interesting technology and met a lot of people. Unfortunately, the WiFi connections were a bit dodgy today, but that should be taken care of tomorrow.
Chia-Liang Kao's presentation was by far the best I saw yesterday. His presentation was succinct, informative, and yet entertaining. He presented the information in an engaging, personable style. He made use of several choice quotes:
- "People are busy; tools should save time."
- "CVS—the software you hate that hates you back."
I'm very excited about SVK. I only recently started using it, but this presentation clued me in to more of its capabilities and some really useful features coming soon. Forthcoming support for views—effectively virtual merges as I understand it—make me think SVK will just keep getting better. I hope the documentation gets better, too.
I enjoyed Joe McMahon's presentation "Design for Pluggability." My work at the $DayJob could benefit from his Module::Pluggable technology.
The worst miss I made today was not going to Cees Hek's "AJAX for Perl Programmers." The people I talked to continued to rave about it well after it was over. I'll definitely have to check out the presentation slides when they become available.
Day 1 of the conference was great. I'm looking forward to Day 2!
Posted at 04:25 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
- The Perl Review YAPC edition
- M&Ms from CheetahMail
- Stuffed Octopus from plainblack
- Bottle opener/keychain from Shopzilla
- Name badge holder form Sxip
- Pen from ITA Software
- St. Louis Perl Mongers pencil
- YAPC::NA 2006 T-shirt
- Perl Onion button
Bag itself courtesy of LiveText
Posted at 01:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Mon, 26 Jun 2006
from Edwardo's on Congress and Dearborn
Posted at 23:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Michael from Detroit and Nathan from Phoenix
Posted at 23:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Posted at 23:05 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
I've arrived safely in Chicago and have checked into my hotel. Unfortunately, I grossly underestimated how long it would take to get from O'Hare to the hotel, so I missed the ArrivalDinner. :-( But I'm sure there will be many opportunities to meet people over the next week. Looking forward to tomorrow!
Posted at 00:31 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Sun, 25 Jun 2006
I'm waiting for a friend to pick me up and take me to Phoenix Sky Harbor airport and, ultimately, YAPC::NA in Chicago. I'm really looking forward to this trip; in addition to the conference itself and all the people I'll meet there, I'll also get to see Chicago for the first time. Hopefully I'll also be able to hook up with some Chicagoland friends I haven't seen for awhile.
In addition to general posts like this one I'll also be posting pictures on Flickr. Through the magic of a Blosxom plugin I wrote, my Flickr photos will show up here on Transformed Planet, so this site should have all the latest info about what I'm up to. (NSA, take note: I've just made your job easier.) Ironically, something like this Flickr-to-Blosxom plugin is just the sort of thing I could present at YAPC, except I didn't write it until Thursday and thus didn't get on the YAPC Lightning Talk schedule. But this is the first time I've been to a Perl conference, so it's probably good that I just sit back and see how things are done.
I've got my towel. Next stop: Chicago O'Hare and the Windy City!
Posted at 12:54 [/tech/yapcna2006] (0 comments) permalink
Mon, 29 May 2006
I'm still not sure how I managed it, but I convinced TheDayJob to send me to the YAPC::NA Perl conference. (It may have had something to do with them actually being a conference sponsor.) This will be a great opportunity to learn some new things and make connections with other people in my line of work. Plus, I'll get to see Chicago for the first time, so I'll be traveling to a new place as well as learning new things. I'll also be getting out of Phoenix for a week when it's at its hottest. I'm really looking forward to this trip; I'll be sure to post pictures and updates along the way!
Posted at 16:37 [/tech/yapcna2006] (4 comments) permalink