divisionbyzero

I’ve been schooling myself on Evolutionary Biology for about 3 or 4 years.
I dropped out of college after my freshman year because Undergrad was then,
and is still is today a lifeless process of rote memorization.  During that
time, I didn’t learn to learn, or learn anything more than “here are the
rules, and if you don’t follow them, there will be consequences.”  I’m not
sure if the topic of this essay is relevant to anyone outside of
Catholicism, but I’ve not heard much about it in the Skeptic / Science
Community.
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I got back from YAPC::NA #10 yesterday. There was a lot of sleeping required to recover from a tech conference with 8 am talks! A Twitter Search for “yapc” indicates I’m not the only one slow to recover those missing hours of sleep.

Overall the conference was a fantastic success. There were highs and lows, and I just wanted to take an opportunity to thank the conference organizers!! They did a wonderful job putting together another spectacular conference.

Also wanted to thank all the speakers as I know firsthand how much work goes into presenting at a conference like YAPC. All the talks I attended were great, however several stood out as exceptional:

• Trapped in a Room with Schwern – Michael Schwern is an excellent speaker, and this free room talk with back and forth between him and members of the community at all levels of mastery provided insight into projects I was unaware of, as well as some relief that most of my concerns about Perl 5 were being discussed by people far smarter than myself.
• The Future of DBIx::Class – Matt S Trout (MST) is a speaker for the real programmers. His volume, accent, and excessive use of profanity actually keep people listening. Getting yelled at by Matt Trout was the highlight of this conference for me. He has good ideas and opinions and he’s not afraid to beat them into your head. Kid gloving is great for Managers, but his presentation style and content really clicks with the people who don’t have their heads so far up their own asses to understand things need to change. Excellent talk about the past, present, and future of DBIx::Class which is the most significant ORM in the Perl Community currently.
• Take Advantage of Modern Perl – chromatic’s speaking style is the complete opposite of MST’s, but his message synced with Schwern, MST, and the The Enlightened Perl Organisation: Encourage people to write better Perl. Write Better Perl. Teach others how to write better Perl. Embrace the language where it is now, and transition away from the bad things in the past. Fantastic Talk.
• perl5i: Perl 5 Improved – Michael Schwern echoing chromatic’s plea for leveraging the best of what Perl 5 offers today. He’s got a module on cpan, perl5i, which implements the best of Perl 5 Tribal Knowledge.
• Catching an ::Std – MST again. He very honestly covered the trials, tribulations, and evolution of “Best Practices” in the Perl community.
• Drop in REPL for CGI Applications – Brock Wilcox floored everyone demonstrating his ridiculously cool module CGI::Inspect. I went in expecting “neat” and found “amazing.” We’ll be abusing this in development very soon.

These were my favorite talks, but like I said, every talk I went to was fantastic. I did miss a few talks I wanted to see due to schedule conflicts, but I’ll be checking the YAPC website for slides and video/audio. The conference organizers were not able to record anything, but a few attendees brought recording equipment with them. If nothing else, I’ll hopefully see those missed talks next year or at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop in 2010!

I’m recommitting to the Perl Iron Man. I was an idiot and jackass for bailing after 1 post! :)

I’ve been doing web application development for years in several languages. I’ve spent time with PHP, Java, but primarily Perl. I consider myself a “Perl Programmer” first, everything else second. Until recently, most people would equate that to “Dinosaur.” However, there’s been a revival of Perl these days! There are a number of reasons for this.

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