use Perl

I drove down to Amsterdam from London (taking the tunnel under the Channel), which turned out to be a little further than I thought. We got lost around Rotterdam due to lots of closed roads but made it in to the conference venue in time to say hi and register, before heading off to the campsite where muttley and I am staying. We headed into town, bumping into more and more Perl people who apparently thought I had a Plan. I was reminded of the Life of Brian: "He's not the messiah, he's a naughty boy". Turned out fine though, and we caught the last metro back.

The conference is amazing. Ann, Jan-Pieter, Jouke and the rest have done a great job. Everything looks professional, organised, and well branded. I am so impressed. Last year's yapc::Europe was very much more random and done on the fly. The schedule is super. The venue is great. Have you got the impression that I like it so far? ;-)

I was a session chair in the Iterative Software room for the entire day, with Tim Maher's "Minimal Perl for the Impatient" and Johan Vromans' "Object Oriented Programming in Perl". I especially liked Tim's idea of trying to teach a small consistent subset of Perl to do awk-like things. The OO Perl thing was good too, nicely covering the basics of OO and how it is done in Perl.

I've somehow convinced lots of people to write up journals on what they're doing during yapc::Europe - check the website for details. This is great, as people can see what's going on during the conference. Today the talks start proper, so I'm going to try and pay attention during sky's talk now...