use Perl

I might as well jump on the bandwagon.

Monday:

• Schwern: writing maintainable code is good anyway, but especially if I want other people to help maintain my CPAN modules :)
• Steve Peters talking about Unicode, because I am a silly American
• zombie email eats your brains! (rjbs)

Tuesday:

• Dave Rolsky: we've talked about Fey. I'm really interested to see how it's shaping up and where he plans to take it in the future.
• DBIx::Router catches my interest because I've done all the things Perrin talks about in his abstract, and I hated it; on the other hand, jjore and the perl 5 VM is sure to be amusing/enlightening/terrifying
• jibsheet, timezones, for many of the same reasons that I want to see Steve's unicode talk

Wednesday:

• toss-up between chromatic and mst
• Schwern, "What is Obvious?", because that's a lesson I'm still learning

I might try a lightning talk; I have several ideas, but I'm not sure if anything will come together.

Each year I start getting excited about YAPC earlier and earlier, and this year I'm also looking forward to staying around afterwards for whatever hacking goes on. Only three more weeks!

CouchDB is a schemaless database with a REST interface, written in Erlang. I want to play with it more.

Its views, by default, are written in terms of mapping functions in Javascript. I like Javascript quite a bit, but if I'm writing something in Perl, I'd rather keep on writing Perl. Specifically, I want to be able to generate views automatically sometimes, and I would much rather just write Perl code than write Perl that generates Javascript.

To that end, I've just uploaded CouchDB::View, which includes a view server (necessary for the backend) and an abstraction of the view definitions (= documents) that handles serializing the view functions for transmission to the view server. (Data::Dump::Streamer ftw!)

Oh, bonus: Module::Install::AutoManifest -- I always forget to add new files to MANIFEST. I'd much rather maintain MANIFEST.SKIP by hand and let Perl put everything else into MANIFEST for me.

These are the first distributions I've written for fun in a while; I certainly enjoy releasing code from work, but there's something to be said for scratching your own itches.