Day 2 of the conference proper was excellent. I saw Casey West talk about using Template Toolkit. I already use TT2 a lot but it was still god to watch someone talk about it with such enthusiasm.
James Duncan talked about Pixie, a very cool looking object database. I can already see uses for it in some of my own work.
Gellyfish's talk was a truely awe-inspiring demonstration of the art of off-the-cuff, hungover presenting :)
I dropped in on Geoffrey Avery's talk about ExtUtils::ModuleMaker which seems like a very powerful replacement for h2xs and then settled into the main hall for power and bandwidth. I wasn't too interested in Thomas Klausner's obfuscation talk, I was waiting for the Testing talk following it, but I found myself considerably impressed by what he was able to do. I've always considered obfuscation to be a bunch of clever tricks of no real use but I think that I may spend more time looking at it. Theone thing that the lecture revealed to me was that obfuscation teaches you a lot about the guts of perl and that can only be good in the long run.
Paul Johnson's Testing and Code Coverage talk was interesting but very dry. Most of it was taken up with discussing the definitions and theory of code coverage. I would have preferred to see longer spent on actually using the tools available to perl programmers, such as Pauls own Devel::Cover.
After tea, we had a series of excellent lightning talks and the Jos Boumans took us through POE for beginners. Jos is a very entertaining speaker and the war stories he used to fill the time at the end of the talk were very funny.
The evening went the usual route, with much beer consumed and ending in Greps room for a game of guess the tune (thanks to many gigabytes of mp3s and iTunes) and much singing fuelled by a bottle of Bushmills from the bar.
Day three is starting slowly :-/
