You're Awesome YAPC!
I just got back from this year’s YAPC::NA and boy did I have a good time!
I’m trying to just get it down before I get back into the groove of regular life, so don’t expect poetry (like those of us who where in rjbs’ talk were treated to during technical difficulties.)
First off, this year I took Rik’s advice from his !!con blog and decided to just walk up to random people and talk to them. In the past I’ve tried to hang out mostly with the same people. While that’s fine and those people are cool, I really got to hang out with a lot of cool new people, like mcsnolte, fitzelliot, vanstyn, silverdirk, and more who I forgot the name of. I also had a really good evening with rjbs and particle, which was a great last hurrah that included singing the Duck Tales theme song.
In addition to a great hallway track, logistics this year were awesome! There were paid staff to ensure that the live streaming of the videos went well (my boss even watched one of my talks live!) There were a handful of technical people who were helpful with the inevitable technical difficulties (thanks again hobbs!) They even got a Hugo award winning CPAN author to speak at one of the keynotes!
And as usual there is a pile of software I need to try out / stress test / write automated tests for. I’m super excited to run my services correctly with silverdirk’s daemonproxy. I’m planning on using vanstyn’s RapidApp at work with more than one project and Dockerizing it and maybe writing a Win32 Installer so people have no excuse not to use it (and in the process following Sawyer’s advice because no one cares about system Perl with a cool enough App.) I’m planning on writing a new personal IRC bot thanks to rjbs’ final 1.21 Gigawatts talk. And the last thing (that I can remember!) is that I’ve committed to helping Tim Bunce release a cool web module by fleshing out the tests.
Finally, there were some wildcards I never would have expected. silverdirk has a DeLorean. He has Perl running parts of the instrument cluster (not totally complete but nearly.) He has a picture with him, his lady-friend, and Christopher Lloyd. Awesome. Also, somehow I missed that Father Chrysostomos is literally a monk who often works on the Perl core. He’s a real perl monk!
I did two talks this year and felt like they went much better than expected. I had a huge turnout for the (as I thought) relatively niche DBIx::Introspector, but I am clearly wrong and it solves a problem a lot of people have. Additionally, the DBIx::Class talk I did seemed to clarify a lot for the people I spoke with afterwards, though I still think it needs work. I’m starting to think it needs to be a class instead of a talk.
I am already excited for next year!
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