The day begins with registering myself with the locals. John McDonald (and son) and Michael Graham got me sorted. It was nice to finally have some faces to put the names, as it always is.
The conference took a while to get started as a technical hitch caused a short delay. Then Richard Dice welcomed us and then gave a brief introduction to the conference and Toronto. He also gave a big thank you to the sponsors, who have helped to bring this the conference together. I'm sure we won't be disappointed.
Opening keynote was from Larry Wall. A look at building communities. Using several intriguing and amusing contradictions and questions as examples of what makes a community. A lot of what we do happens by happy accident, but there is some kind of coordination going behind the scenes, we just don't always realise it. Larry had given the talk in Russia, as part of an Open Source presentation, which nicely added to his stories behind his questions, as did the recent PUGS Hackathon.
Next up was Allison Randal updating us with the State of The Carrot. When Allison gave this at Belfast last year, I was a little disappointed. Allison claims it was all down to lack of sleep, personally I blame the jokes :) This time around I was very much impressed. The whole talk was held together with a Perlised version of The Hunting Of The Snark, adapted by Allison herself, and worked exceptionally well. Each section neatly tied in with the associated slides. Among the updates were those for CPAN and perl.org. I was suitably amused to see JJ's name up on the screen ... Jon Allen's perldoc. He gets named checked in front of over 300 North American Perl Monger, and not there to bask in the 5 minutes of fame. Well it'll have only gone to his head ;)
A sort break while the rooms where reorganised and the conference began properly. The first talk I planned to see was Peter Pete Krawczyk's Tester's Toolkit talk. Unfortunately it proved very popular, to the point the room was overflowing. I got to watch for a while, but seeing as Peter was really only covering the basics of testing, I figured I would duck out and go and watch Peter Scott talk about Taming Legacy Perl. I'm glad I did, as this was more the kind of talk I was expecting. While none of Peter Scott's talk was revolutionary, there were some good suggestions to think about whenever you're faced with maintaining somebody else's code. I have had a chance to read his latest book, but it seemed like the book expands on several topics he covered today. Either way I'll find out once i get around to reading the book and reviewing the slides again.
I was originally planning to see chromatic & Ian Langworth present Common Testing Solutions, but perhaps unsurprisingly it too was packed to the rafters. Testing is quite a hot topic these days, and there is a lot of interest in getting the most of Perl testing. I dropped in briefly on Geoffrey Young talking about Apache::Test, which looked interesting, but having missed the beginning I didn't really get the full benefit of the talk. Hopefully the slides will make sense once I get a chance to look over them next week.
There are three tracks today, track one is very heavily devoted to testing, track two covers Apache & mod_perl, while the third is a lot more ad-hoc. For third track in the afternoon, Ingy is doing a tutorial on Kwiki plugins, which didn't really grab me. I was torn between the first two tracks after the break, but in the end opted for Geoff Young's mod_perl 2 talk and Jose's Black Magic Perl talk. I've seen part of it before, but there were a few extras. Steve Jenkins was in the room when Jose got to the camel code obfu and rightly got a round of applause. The Saturn code was pretty cool too, but Cog's favourite was BooK's Perl Journal obfu.
Today's session ended with me catching up with various Perl folks who I don't often get to see, particularly Ivor, spurkis and Allison. The London.pm'ers seem to be heading off on an adventure to find food, but I already spied an Indian restaurant on Queen St I wanted try. Although technically I don't come from Birmingham (I'm from Congleton near Manchester) and don't live their either (I live in Worcestershire ... even though i have Birmingham postcode), it has become my home. The best thing about Birmingham (in my eyes at least) is the Balti. I love curries, and while we might be spoilt by some fine restaurants in Birmingham, it'll be nice to see if the culinary expertise really has travelled across the the Atlantic.
Tomorrow it's my turn to talk. I really hope I'm as interesting as today's speakers were. I don't want to let the side down. A great start to the conference, the organisers have really done themselves proud. Looking forward to tomorrow.
