So I was able to stick around for the hackathon after YAPC::NA, and Patrick Michaud put me to work revamping the PGE test suite for Perl 6 rules to make it similar to the one for Perl 5. The Perl 5 regex suite uses a plain, tab-delimited file, with each column corresponding to arguments to pass into a Test::More function and results to compare the against. While there was some PIR code, I fortunately didn't have to wrangle with it too much, but I did have to understand what it did. The Perl 5 test suite also had the logic to skip or todo a certain line in the test file, and Jerry Gay mentioned that he would like that information to be in the tab-delimited file for easier extensibility. So I decided to revamp the Perl 5 test suite before I translated the same method over to the Perl 6 test suite (which is what Patrick Michaud initially had wanted). The end goal was to be able to share the Perl 6 rules test suite between Perl 6 on Parrot and Perl 6 on Perl 5, and that meant having an intermiate file that kept the test data, but within the implementation for testing.
Development the first day went to changing the documentation for the Perl 5 suite to match its code, and to making the test suite run *all* the tests in the file, rather than the first 800. This amounted to running the test suite over and over again (since many tests near the end actually made parrot hang), marking certain tests TODO or SKIP with as good a reason as I could fathom. I'm sure there was a more automated (and faster) way to do it, but I finished that part of it around 10ish at night (I had started around 2pm).
Anyway, one of the reasons I stopped was to go celebrate Yuval Kogman's birthday with a few others too. I think it was Bill Odam, Ann Barcomb, Ingy dot Net, Marcus Ramberg, Helen Cook, Gaal Yahas (<--thanks Yuval!), and Casey West. We took the el to a jazz bar, and arrived about 1/2 hour before last call. That meant a lot of drinking fast. During that time, however, Bill Odam showed his mad skills as an artist, and both Yuval and Marcus added their own art as well, on the butcher paper that the table was covered with. At the other table, Gaal gave a geography lesson to Ann, and gave tips about where to go if she ever travels down to the Middle East.
After that bar closed, we meandered down the way to another one, an Irish pub. It was great that it was still open, but we only had about 30 minutes before that one closed too. So we ended up drinking more (Marcus sure can drink a lot) and talked about random things, none of which I can remember. When we left that place and realized there were no places we could all get into (because some didn't have passports with them), we called cabs and headed back to campus where I fell asleep after staying up refactoring the Perl 5 test suite and reading some more of Intermediate Perl.
I got to a late start again the following day, and transitioned to working on the Perl 6 test suite. This went much faster, since I pretty much just had to write some regexen to copy all the function calls of the test suite and create a tab-delimited file for each one. There were some issues with tests that had unicode-escaped characters that were to be passed in as arguments to the test functions, but after bugging Patrick Michaud about it a couple times, I was able to get it all working. I then made the code nicer to look at, and e-mailed it to Patrick to review.
After we got kicked out of the cafeteria where the hackathon was being held, some of us went to the SSV dorms and continued hacking. I fooled around with YAML-Tiny, but didn't make much headway as I was sidetracked with catching up on email and blogs. I believe chromatic was working on NCI, a C calling library, and also embedding Parrot in Perl 5. I think Audrey and Ingy were working on Module::Compile stuff and Adam Kennedy was working on something where he really wanted to be able to unbless a reference without adding dependencies (I don't think he ever figured a way to do it). After a few hours, I decided to call it a night and headed to my room in MSV.
During the last day of the hackathon, I had to check out from the dorms and get to the airport, but I was able to hang out for a bit in between. I ended up looking more at YAML-Tiny and working to get it parse a few more things, but didn't get that far. Jose Castro was closely watching the Portugal and England game, and Adam Kennedy and I joined him when it went to double overtime and PKs. There was a bit of delay (a few seconds) on the TV, so Jose had enlisted one of his friends on IRC to send him updates of what was happening. It was great because he knew Portugal had won a few seconds before everyone saw it, so he stood up (we were in the back of the room) with a beaming smile and was claiming victory. It was great :-)
After the game ended, it was about time for me to go with some others to O'Hare. I had originally planned on sharing a cab back to O'Hare with Uri, but decided that day not to do so and save some money instead (I had already spent much more than I had originally intended while in Chicago). Luckily, he was fine with me ditching out on him. It was about an hour train ride, but I got there well before I had to depart. I had gone with Ann Barcomb, Abigail, Marcus Ramberg, and Toorga (I think. I didn't ask him to spell his name, and sadly never talked with him much at the conference). We all said our farewells to one another and went to our respective terminals.
Since I had arrived a couple hours before my boarding time, I decided to buy for wireless access, and worked on getting irssi built (never was able to until I got back home). I also was feeling hungry since I hadn't eaten anything, so I ate at a cafe in the terminal while keeping tabs on the Brazil and France game. It was nil-nil the whole game until (I think) the 80th minute, when France scored. France ended up winning, so that means Portugal and France are going to meet each other in the next round.
Well, since I didn't do any hacking on the plane ride home, that concludes my first ever hackathon experience. Like my first YAPC, I couldn't have asked for a better time. Looking forward to some more opportunities! :-)
