use Perl

My talk for The Perl Auctioneer has been accepted for YAPC::Europe in Belfast. It'll be the first time I've been a speaker at a conference, so I'm a bit nervous about it all, but I'm sure I'll be fine once it's all over. I actually hate giving presentations, but I am the sort of person who just gets on and does it. I usually find people are really receptive afterwards anyway and I often forget how nervous I was to begin with.

I've now done many talks to the Birmingham Perl Mongers, and they've given pointers on style, so hopefully I won't be too bad.

The original two versions of my talk that I've done over the last couple of years are going to be changed drastically. Partly due to the time constraint, but also because (a) eBay have change their web interface and (b) I'm now looking into the SOAP API they've released. I hope to have a bit of a compare and contrast between the two interfaces and to get feedback on what I've developed so far. I hope to have a mostly finished version of the bundle of modules before the conference, but whether I release them to CPAN will be another matter.

I am also working on two talks for South Birmingham LUG, who have asked me to do a bit on Perl. I'm doing an introduction to Perl, CPAN and CPAN testing. There has already been good interest, so hope to recruit a few converts. One poster asked if the testing bit was about the Perl testing modules, which it isn't. However, if there is already an interest in that too, I can see me being invited back to talk some more :)

For someone who hates getting up in front of people (I used to freak when soundchecking at big gigs .. I'd have to pretend I was in an empty hall), I seem to be doing rather a lot of it lately. And now work want me to go talk to loads of people I've never met ... scary stuff.