use Perl

This YAPC was far more intense than previous ones for me, both on the professional and the personal level - so much so that I've waited until getting home to try to blog about it.

I arrived Sunday evening - unfortunately too late for the arrival dinner. Or the anti-arrival dinner. In fact, I was so late that no one was willing to deliver food at all. The perils of routing oneself through O'Hare.

Chicago is an interesting town; a tad rough around the edges, and very much itself. I haven't stayed in doems since college, so I'd forgotten the dorm experience. As dorms go, the MSV dorms were quite okay. I gather that the SSV dorms were like living in concrete monk's cells. I was foresighted enough to take along a container of disinfecting wipes, which was nice to clean up around the shower and sink a little. I recommend it for anyone staying in a dorm.

The session were all very good this year, with some very cool stuff which I intend to start using and adapting as soon as possible:

• Object::Trampoline, which uses one of the most wonderful pieces of subtle Perl I've seen in a while: an object that exists only for the purpose of replacing itself with something else as soon as it's called.
  
• Test::WWW::Selenium, which wraps up the Selenium web testing platform in a handy Test::More interface. I intend to try grafting this into simple_scan as soon as I possibly can.
  
• The Goo, a development environment which features a way of deciding "what do I feel like doing" (a couple problems installing, but I can work those out and send back some patches).
  
• Jifty, yet another web app development platform, but this one looks a little less esoteric - not trying do hard to be "Perl on Rails". It installed a lot of interesting-looking prereqs as well; I'm planning on firing up Pos::Webserver::Source and reading a lot next week.
  

My presentations both went very well, though I think I may have been a little too high-energy in the Pluggability one, so I may have been off-camera a chunk of the time. Lots of interest in that; I'll need to finish off the final version and get it on CPAN soonest.

The simple_scan presentation went very well;. the jokes got laughs when they were supposed to, and the stories were well-recieved as well. I had someone come up to me and say that they'd come to my second talk because they'd been told that I was a good speaker, and that they were glad I did. Thanks very much, whoever you are!

I've spent more time on #perl this year, especially in the time leading up to the conference, and it was really great to meet the people that I did; I was also glad that I had good solid work to refer to this year. I feel like I've come a long way in the past two years.

Had a great time in the off-hours as well, with good conversation, and sharing MST3K with both old and new (hi, q!) friends.

More tomorrow. Time for bed.