(I did promise a more cheerful post, and at the moment, my alternative to writing this is to read more articles about the 15th century eastern Mediterranean, and try to come up with a research proposal, whose success or failure will determine whether I get to continue to have an academic career. No pressure or anything.)
So YAPC this year was a blast, just like last year. I spent much of Day 1 vaguely out of sorts as I generally do ("who do I want to say hello to and haven't found yet? What am I missing? What are the cool kids doing that no one has told me about?" etc.) but that had thankfully passed by the end of the day. Day 2 was overshadowed by rising worry about my presentation ("will I remember what I want to say? Will I run embarrassingly over? Will it make any sense?") which subsided for the duration of the conference dinner and came back in force on the morning of day 3. The presentation went well though; I got a lot of compliments and a few good questions, and was mostly unable to eat my lunch due to being kept talking about various things. I'll take that last as a sign of success.
What I will probably do here in this journal, over the next little while, is go over the data model and algorithm model of my collation engineââ¬âbasically all the technical bits of my project that were left out of my presentation for being heavy on explanation and light on humor. Some of you will probably have better ideas than I would about the various data models, and many of you will have opinions about DB design (since I haven't yet implemented data persistence.) Lots of you will be way better at algorithms than I am. With any luck I can even get a few of you to volunteer opinions on user interfaces, which is the next best thing to releasing the core module on CPAN and letting someone else write a UI.
The "Armenian studies" version of this presentation will be on 11 September in Paris, so I'm hoping to make a little more progress on the code before then, though I'll still need time to make the presentation a little more palatable to a very different audience. (Really sorry, domm, but the yak will have to go. They just wouldn't get it.)
Well you were quite easy to get talking
And it was interesting. I look forward to hear about it again next year. Applied perl is always nice - especially when it is in an unusual area.
