[ Cross-posted from http://hanekomu.vox.com ]
YAPC::EU 2007 in Vienna was really cool. It was good to see all those people again who I haven't seen since my active Perl hacking phase ended around the turn of the century. Damian, acme, 2shortplanks, mjd and many others brought back memories. My work at the University of Vienna, writing the backend software for the Austrian domain name registry (in Perl, of course), is quite interesting, but I haven't kept in touch with the Perl community or followed the cool new developments for years, mainly because I've been studying the game of Go lately. The YAPC::EU has rekindled the interest in hacking and being part of the Perl community again. I can already see it draining time from playing Go...
One of the most interesting experiences was seeing miyagawa's talk about Web::Scraper. The talk itself was good, but it was what happened afterwards that set things in motion for me. I looked at other modules miyagawa wrote and stumbled upon plagger.
It all started from there.
After watching videos of talks about plagger (from YAPC::Asia 2007) and reading slides and documentation, I realized that plagger effectively implemented an idea I had years ago but didn't know how to efficiently go about it, so it remained a rather vague concept. It did involve pipes, but I didn't think of using RSS or Atom feeds. I've already got some ideas for custom feeds and other ideas about extending plagger.
Last afternoon I was watching a video of a talk about vox.com was being built (also from YAPC::Asia 2007). The concepts involved are awesome: Data::ObjectDriver, TheSchwartz, memcached etc. It seems that six apart is one of the coolest companies doing social networking and Perl right now.
If only I had known about these things before the YAPC::EU... But I talked to miyagawa at the Heurigen where the attendees dinner was held and he said that if no other asian Perl monger groups want to do YAPC::Asia 2008, it would probably be held in Tokyo again. And I wanted to go to Japan for three weeks in spring of 2008 to see the contrast of hypermodern cities, old temples, to play Go and get a feeling for the people and the culture. So going to a Perl conference there would be perfect.
Time to learn a bit more about the Japanese language...
