This weekend we travelled to the Nordic Perl Workshop in Copenhagen. "We" includes a bunch of Fotango people: Arthur, Nicholas, Paul, Richard, Tom, and myself.
We left work on Friday and travelled (on different flights, how organised are we!) from London to Copenhagen (lovely airport). Some of us left early, but I arrived in Copenhagen in the evening with Richard and Tanja and headed straight to the pre-announced pub. Sadly everyone had left earlier as they were all lightweights so we had to force ourselves to drink the local beer until the early hours. London pubs close at 11pm, but luckily we were in a civilised country.
A quick nap later and we managed to get up and have breakfast with everyone in the hotel. Actually, time for a diversion. I was really quite surprised as to how good design was evident everywhere. It really was nice having things just work as I expected them to.
Anyway, we get to the venue by the magic of Taxis. The venue was good, with two sessions happening in tandem. Some of the talks were in Danish (hey, I have enough trouble learning Dutch!) and some in English. Overall it was very well organised and the schedule was wonderful. The talks were interesting and the discussions during lunch and dinner even more so.
I particularly enjoyed the Build systems, improving development and delivery talk by Richard and Arthur. This described the automatic build system we use at Fotango for all our large projects. I actually think it's the coolest thing we have at Fotango and it makes my life easier on a daily basis.
I also enjoyed Christian's Using Perl for iCalendar manipulation where he explained that he wrapped the libical library. Seeing as Reefknot is dead this does seem like the way to go. In general we've been doing a lot of iCal parsing recently. Dates are fun.
But of course by far the most interesting talks in the conference were my ones ;-) I talked about Messaging in Perl where I described why Fotango uses a messaging system, how easy it is to use and why bad puns are always the best ones. The module is on CPAN of course.
One of the last sessions on Sunday was a panel organised by the four pumpkings present on perl development. Here's a photo where you can see the panel outline. it was probably the highest concentration of pumpkings at any conference this year, and we covered a wide range of subjects and answered questions from the audience. It was great.
Thanks Jonas for a great conference!
