I meant to keep this up to date whilst I was at the Workshop, but I was really busy talking to people and the wireless LAN only really worked in the main lecture theatre (and when I was there, I was there to listen - not surf the web!) So here's my report all in one go.
Day 1
This was the only day I wasn't speaking. I arrived early and met up with a few people that I knew (jouke, acme, qmacro, kudra, kane, and a few more). I tried to sit in a German tutorial for the first hour and a half, but my knowledge of German wasn't really up to it so for the second half of the morning I sat in Mark Overmeer's tutorial on Perl/Tk.
After lunch everyone listened to Damian's talk on Extreme Programming where he disects his SelfGOL program. I'd seen the talk in San Diego last year, but it's the kind of talk that you can listen to many times and still not follow it all :)
I spent a lot of the afternoon outside of talks, catching up with old friends, but I made a point of listening to jouke talk about pVoice and Damian talk about Lingua::Romana::Perligata.
In the evenimg we all went off to a local castle for some good food (and some beer).
Day 2
The the whole of the morning on day two was taken up by Damian's new class on Programming in Perl 6. As you'd expect this was a great talk and it really succeeds in its goal of demonstrating that Perl 6 isn't going to be be all that different from Perl 5.
After lunch, it was my first talk - Idiotic Perl. In this talk I look at the kinds of people who write bad Perl code and what we can do to help them. When I'd practiced it for london.pm, it had run to 25 minutes so I was worried about filling the 40 time slot, but it was fine. I finished pretty much on time, but the questions afterwards made us run a bit late. People obiovusly wanted to continue discussing the subject so the organisers suggested setting up a BOF later in the day to discuss it further.
Later in the afternoon I listened to acme talk about Parrot and Nick Clark talk about large numbers in Perl 5.8. One talk that I found very interesting was Mark Overmeer's discussion of the work he's doing to bring some sanity to the email modules on CPAN. I'll dertainly be checking out his His Mail::Box modules.
After the main talks had finished we had the BOF session. I was amazed that about thirty people turned up to talk more about Idiotic Perl and (more particularly nms. I think I've gained some more developers, testers and (most importantly) advocates.
Day 3
Day 3 started with me giving my Idiomatic Perl tutorial. It's aimed at people who haven't done that much Perl and haven't seen some of the more interesting corners of the language, so I'm not sure that it was really at the right level for the audience - who all seemed very knowledgable about Perl. But the audience laughed at the right points and many people came up to me afterwards to tell me they'd enjoyed it - so I guess I was doing something right.
I was a little disappointed that my tutorial was up against jouke's introduction to wxPerl as I'd liked to have seen it, but hopefully I'll get another chance later in the year.
I spent most of the afternoon talking to people about nms and Idiotic Perl, but I was sure to be back in the lecture room for the closing talk - Damian's Life, the Universe and Everything. It has everything you expect from a Damian Conway talk and I'd recommend that you try to see it when Damian is passing thru your town.
All in all I had a great time at the workshop and I hopw to go back next year (5th - 7th March 2003, I think). Many thanks to all the organisers for making it such an enjoyable experience.
