The life of a CA Copenhagen Campus Connection

"Hello - my name is Damian. I'm from the future"...with these words my Day 2 at YAPC::Europe 2008 started, when Damian Conway gave his keynote "A.B.C.D.E.F.G" about Contextual::Return in the morning. Btw - it was amazing what that module could actually do - does it brew coffee and tie my shoelaces as well?

Larry Wall - perl hacker extraordinare

At Day 1, I didn't manage to see more than the keynote by Larry Wall, because we were really busy handing out t-shirts at the registration desk, but at Day 2 - I attended 3 interesting talks appart from the morning keynote.

• Lars Jørgensen - Making Large Legacy Systems Beautiful

I know Lars from DIKU where we wrote a couple of projects together. He now works for the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge UK, doing loads of perl hacking on their old legacy systems, and deciding on a daily basis what to recycle and what to refactor. The talk gave his personal view on how to handle legacy systems in a fairly big research environment. His final observations were pretty good, but he was a bit shy giving the presentation. Anyway it was good to see him again  

• Adam Kennedy - Tiny

Peter Makholm (I think) dragged me into this talk, telling me what a good speaker Adam Kennedy is - and I wasn't disappointed. But for a talk about tiny perl modules there was an enomous amount of big machinery involved!

• Léon Brocard - Working in the cloud

Léon is an amazing guy, having loads of modules on CPAN and doing loads of community work in London.pm and starting other Perl Monger groups. His talk was about cloud computing and how to put your business in the cloud and using the cloud services available to make your computing systems scalable. The talk was intended to be a discussion, but it was held in the biggest auditorium - and it seemed a bit hard to get people to interact in a BoF (birds of a feather) way.

This is what 300 lunchbags looks like

On Day 3 Damian started out by giving his second keynote "Beautiful Perl" and man you can do some serious ugly coding in Perl if you want to! On Day 3 I also heard 3 talks:

• Jonathan Rockway - Moose Introduction

I simply HAD to hear this one, because everywhere I went in the hallway people were saying Moose in every other sentence - and I had no idea what Moose was. I got wiser Appart from being an international greeting - its also a module making Perl more object-oriented and enabling a lot of the cool Perl 6 stuff into Perl 5.10.

• Phillippe Bruhat - Messing with git history using Git::FastExport

This talk was a bit dissapointing. The talker couldn't get his laptop to work with the projector and suddenly he was 15 min. behind schedule and unfortunately the talk got a little amputated by that.

• Chia-Liang Kao (CL) - Branch Management with SVK

So I stayed in the same room, after the git talk, to start the video-cam, but got stuck in a really interesting talk by CL, who works for Best Practical who also makes Request Tracker. The talk was about SVK - a tool to do offline editing in your subversion repository. Its also available as an Eclipse plugin. Boy that was a REALLY nice talk!

CL himself

I was really glad I finally got around to attending a YAPC - it was definately worth while. If not for the talks - then for the auction at the end. I've never before heard people paying 1.700 DKK to get Damian Conway to NOT rip up his book Perl Best Practices.... also don't be alarmed if you suddenly see the domain ihate.cpan.org  - it was auctioned off for a fair price

There's pictures on Flickr - search for yapceu2008 or ye2008.

I'll cross my fingers and hope I can get around to it - to go to Lisbon in 2009. The theme for next years YAPC::Europe is Corporate Perl.