use Perl

The awards presentations were ok.

The Python award presenter tried to cram in a 15-30 minute talk into about 30 seconds. Consequently he made a lame "version 3 releases" being better and faster than "some version 6 releases". I think it was kind of lame and if he had more time it could have seemed more good natured. It just overshadowed the award for a guy that had been a big part of the Python community.

The Open Source Awards were ok, most of the recipients weren't able to attend and didn't give any speeches for the most part.

The White Camels were ok.

I think everyone was rushing to get to the keynotes.

It's always interesting to run into Free Software Foundation folks. The are definitely True Believers.

I would call it a low key thing and an effort to broaden their base of support I think.

The best part was to meet some folks from Ubuntu/Canonical/Launchpad/whatever. So hi to Nick, Rick and Joey.

I ran into Daniel again from McClatchy and chatted with him with the Ubuntu guys.

A fun but short time because we wanted to head to the keynotes.

Wow. Matt Trout was a trip.

I didn't know what to expect but I got something.

Not sure how much Catalyst I picked up but I was entertained.

Once again what I expected and what I got were a bit askew.

There was lots of good stuff but it mostly seemed to be stuff I've seen before. Like Higher Order Javascript and what little I've seen of the Crockford videos.

I wouldn't knock it too much, I guess I was hoping for something about how libraries are structured or something.

Ok, Day 0 of OSCON 2008 is over.

It was a good day. I learned about 3 good things from the Mastering Perl tutorial. I am still interested in Test Driven Development but I can't fault Josh for my false expectations.

I got to have a few beers and chat with some fellow attendees: Mike whose family business is printing services in Des Moines, some guys that work for McClatchy in Raleigh (sorry I can't recall your names at the moment[update: Daniel and Craig]), Jason that works for Texas A&M and Dave who works at the National Gallery of Art. Mostly Perl guys but all who will use whatever tool to get the job done.

So I will call it a very good day. I had planned to not be so sociable (missing my wife and kids a lot) but I had a good time talking with everyone. Besides, conferences are most fun when you meet other people and sparks fly.

I expect more good things tomorrow.

I'm looking forward to meeting all of the friends I haven't met yet tomorrow.

Well, I'm not sure what my expectations for this tutorial were but they weren't met I guess.

I feel I got more from reading _Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook_.

To be fair to Josh he is going through a lot of matter in a shorter amount of time than it was designed for (6 hours vs. 3 hours).

A lot of people left the tutorial prior to the first break.

UPDATE:

In reflection I think my expectations weren't aligned with what the talk was. It seems to be starting from the beginning and building on that.

I think _Perl Testing_ basically covered the stuff Josh covered. So, I still think it was worthwhile to see what the current, optimal way to do testing in Perl. I just wanted more.

That and all the cool kids went to the Django tutorial. ;-)

Starting off good.

I do expect good things though so my expections are a little high.

EDIT

Liked it a lot.

Affirmed my thoughts about log4perl, i.e. I should use it!

Profiling is good. benchmarking requires thought.

Persistence is something I need to think about and probably try to preach to my users.

After a long day of travel (left home at 8am EDT and arrived at my hotel at 5:30pm PDT) I'm in Portland.

I chatted with a couple of folks on the light rail from the airport, most of whom will be attending OSCON.

I scouted out the convention center and registered. There was some interesting schwag in the OSCON bag. The Google moleskine like book is probably the most interesting. The Linux Journal is ok. I have a subscription so it's more of something to read.

I met Darren whom I'm sharing a room with but he was busy doing some Postgres related stuff.

It's only 9pm but my body thinks it is midnight so I guess I'll be heading to bed and hope my body and the big light outside get sync'ed together better soon.

$work is paying for me to go to OSCON this year.

I started the whole process a bit late so I missed out on the early bird discount. I even missed out on the room discount. I was able to find someone to split a room with and he's even a speaker at the conference.

I'm looking forward to attending. The last time I made it was when it was in Monterrey.

Good times.

I meant to have this as a reply to something a long time ago (I think it was when Alias released the latest strawberry).

It was mostly fanboi-ish stuff about my Perl heroes.

There is of course Larry at the top.

Foundational heroes are people like Randall, tchrist, Tim Bunce, Nick Ing-Simmons, Jarkko, Nate, Orwant...many many more.

Then there are my current heroes. Folks that by their example inspire me to want to do more and be a better programmer. They are folks like Ovid, chromatic, brian d foy, Allison and especially Alias.

Just reading what they have done in the last year or so is *insert a superlative*.

Alias's work on strawberry is pure inspiration to me. The Portable Perl stuff will be quite an encore.

So, many thanks to all of the people that continue to make Perl the thing I love to code in and glad to be tangentially in the community.

And I shouldn't forget hfb. She adds a lot of spice to the mix.