I was torn on which talks to attend. I sat in on Todd Olson's "Automating Workflow" and Steven Lembark's "Developing a Test Harness" but I was still half asleep through them both so I didn't get much out of them (sorry guys).
cog's "How NOT To Write a Perl Resume and How NOT To Behave in an Interview" was pretty much what I expected. :) The man has a great sense of humor and has no (apparent) trouble speaking to groups of people.
I missed a few talks because I decided to check out the job fair. I'm not in the market for a new job but I wanted to see some of the other companies that are using Perl. I ended having some interesting conversations with a few folks who were hanging out in the area.
I made it back for Luke Cross' "Agile Testing with Selenium" but I was a bit late. (Sorry Luke!) I don't use Selenium yet but I have been watching it for a while and would love to start using it at work.
After lunch, I caught Perrin's "Care and Feeding of Large Web Applications". We don't have a large web app but much of what he discussed we already do. We deploy "builds" which consist of a CD or DVD containing our complete installation set up. We use the CPAN shell to pick which modules we want to install, install them and then load them into our RCS. We have an upgrade script for the existing software and will adding an upgrade script for the future releases. We use branches more than most places but our RCS makes doing so a breeze (and merges are fairly simple too). We're working on improving our test procedures. All in all he validated that we were on the right track even if we haven't perfected it yet.
I'm glad I stayed in the Cougar Den for Casey West's "MochiKit: Good Tools for the Web Developer". I've been meaning to try it and MooTools (the other kit he mentioned a few times). I think that MochiKit is going to overkill but MooTools might be a good fit. I'll have to read the docs and play with them both to find out for sure. Once again Casey had great examples and plenty of humor to keep the talk flowing smoothly. He's one of my favorite speakers.
Todd Wade's "WAAAC" talk wasn't exactly what I was expecting but it made me want to look at CGI::Application and Catalyst again. He made them both look very easy to use.
I bailed out of the talks early because I was exhausted. I went back to the dorm and rested briefly before getting ready for the YAPC dinner and TPF auction.
We got to the Hilton a little early and hung out talking to people as they came in. Uri, Wade, Yaakov and company are a hoot to watch when they get together. It's like the 3 Stooges, Laurel and Hardy & Abbot and Costello all rolled together.
The dinner was nice. They had a mess of Texas BBQ with all the trimmings. They had IRC up on the big screen and it seemed to be the focal point of much of the conversations.
Uri conned, I mean, convinced my wife to help him with the auction by handing the items to him. She said that she had a good time. I can't imagine how since she's just a computer user not a geek but Uri is a funny guy. I suppose his antics kept her amused, I know it did me. :)
After the dinner we decided to see who had shown up to the Beer BOF. They set it up in the basement of the dorm. Quite a few people showed up for it. It was amusing... Everyone was congregated in one corner of the room (packed in more like it) and the rest of the room was empty. We weren't there very long before an area coordinator for the dorm came down and busted it up. He said that alcohol wasn't allowed in the common areas and that normally he'd have called the campus police but we were guests so he'd let us off with a warning if we packed up and went to our rooms. Everyone packed up and moved the party upstairs to a some adjoined rooms. Mary and I didn't stay long after that because it was very cramped and extremely loud.
We headed outside to enjoy the nice evening and met up with Jesse Shy. We stood around talking with him for probably two hours. He's got a ton of "war stories" from his days in the military and he tells them well.
