I got up at 5am this morning. I do believe I still have jetlag, ugggh. Lovely morning, though.
Yesterday was the first day of YAPC::NorthAmerica 2001 and what a day it was. With an early start (for me, ahem), I met up with everyone (yes, that is a blanket "everyone". You all know who you are ;-).
Damian started off the conference with a keynote on Perl6, which is getting more interesting. I've seen his Perl6 talk a couple of times and the slides keep on changing and he always seems to highlight cool things I've missed. Damian rocks.
Wireless access in the rooms. Killer app. Talk about the speakers (and attendees) behind their back. Wonderful!
I then went to "CPAN, PPM and the future", which seemed to bring up all the old questions about how CPAN could be better, such as: more metadata, a ratings system (like the Advogato trust metric), different categorisation and so on. I think they'll be another BOF on this, and it looks like aevil will force me to go and take notes ;-)
During that talk, I finished and released version 1.0 of my GraphViz module. I'm giving a talk on it on Friday and I thought it would be appropriate. Of course, it's finally a 1.0 release but unimatrix and 2shortplanks have MacOS X compatibility and default node patches they want me to include...
I then went to "Perl Apprenticeship Hour", where people gave out ideas for projects. gnat's were the best, of course.
A quick lunch later and I found myself in Brian Ingerson's "Programming with Perl and C using Inline.pm", which as usual was excellent. Brian told me at the start of the class to do something cool with Inline. I wrote, tested, and documented Tie::GHash and uploaded it to the CPAN before the end of his talk. Brian's asked me to do a complete writeup of the process, so expect another journal entry later on ;-)
The evening was fun. We went to a "smoked beef" place, which accomodated 50 hungry Perl hackers easily, then off to a cool pub with a guy I'd met at ApacheCon London. A few beers later, we drove up to Mount-Royal and checked out the city from a lookout point. Very pretty indeed. A racoon attacked us, but I made it back to the dorms safely, avoiding a software licensing argument (err, discussion) on the way in.
Today is going to be much more hectic. And fun. Well done to lenzo, lucs, mendel and the rest of the guys for setting up another wonderful conference!
