use Perl

Yesterday was the first day of the German Perl Workshop, which was great fun. DJ and I drove down to the conference in heavy rain. But we got there, picked up our badges (commenting on the coloured dots on the badges (speakers get blue, people going to the dinner get green, and organisers get red), and made our way to the first talk.

The first talk I attended was a talk which I thought was on Generating Perl Code. This is a great topic for me as I talked about it at the TPC last year, I've been doing lots of Template Toolkit stuff recently - which compiles templates to Perl code, and, well, I've been generating Perl from Java bytecode ;-)

The talk didn't go into as much detail as I'd wanted, but I guess I'm kind of an advanced pupil ;-) I also made it into the PerlTk tutorial, where Mark Overmeer was showing pratical uses of Tk. It looks cleaner than I thought, although I'll wait until Jouke's WxPerl talk before deciding between the two...

Damian is here, and the Damian track is, as ever, terribly strong. Damian is just such a great speaker and he has wonderful material. I've been making my slides more interesting to try and compete... He did Extreme Perl and Programming in Latin, which are both crazy. He's mad, I tell you.

A few talks later, and then everyone heads off to a beautiful castle for dinner. Everyone was a bit more relaxed (the beer and wine helped), the food was good, and it was great to wander around and talk to everyone.

Sometimes I wonder how people manage to organise Perl conferences so well!

Although the logo needs more orange...