Day 2
I hadn't sleeped well thinking about my presentation (Making the Switch: DBI to Class::DBI). I kept going over what I was going to say, and how. I knew Casey West was giving a talk a little after mine on Beyond the Basics of Class::DBI and I'd hoped there wouldn't be too much overlap. On the way down to breakfast I ran into Casey in the elevator where we briefly discussed our presentations. The good news, there shouldn't be much overlap.
The morning was spent attending Offline Programmatic Generation of Web Pages, Perl Modules for Exceptions, Logging and Parameter Validation, How to Serve a Billion Requests a Day with Perl, and Using Graph Theory to Detect Security Policy Violators. Each of which was good, and I managed to pick up a couple of things to take away with me. During breaks and talk changes people were coming up to me saying they were looking forward to my talk. I began worrying that my talk was not going to meet their expectations.
Went to lunch with Trush, Chris Winters (still not knowing his last name), Jim Brandt and Jeff Bisbee at a local food court. This helped to calm my nerves before my presentation, and they provided words of encouragement.
Next was my presentation. I had some concerns with the amount of time I had (I probably should have asked for more) and the amount of content I had to cover. I had taken this into account though and made my slides in such a way that offline viewing would provide a cookbook of sorts. I also didn't want to come across as "You should switch to Class::DBI because it's *SO* cool". The approach I wanted to take is that of "You've made the decision to switch, here is a little help in doing so". When I started the transition, I couldn't find such a resource. Nervous as hell (this was my first YAPC and my first time presenting to a big crowd), and with a much larger audience than I had expected (a Perl 6 talk was going on in the next room and they seemed to draw the large crowd) I proceeded. Looking down one of my worst nightmares had been realized. That Guy was sitting right in front of the podium causing a bit more panic. I stumbled a couple times, and had a problem with my browser but overall I think my talk went ok, although I know I can do better.
I have to admit after finishing my presentation, I glossed over during the Perl and DB2 talk coming back to for High-Availability & DBI. This was an interesting talk, even with it's focus on MySQL, we were able to use the same principles with PostgreSQL. It was nice to confirm the work that we've been doing, and that other people came to the same solution.
Final sessions of the day were spent following Casey West who presented Beyond the Basics of Class::DBI and Managing Email with Perl. Beyond the Basics of Class::DBI while featuring the wildly popular Camoose, picked up further down the road from where my talk left off and included a number of useful modules as well as proper warnings. I've been using Email::Simple and Email::Send in work projects for a while now, so I was hoping that Managing Email with Perl would round out my knowledge and it did.
With the stress of having to do a presentation now leaving me, I was ready to enjoy the boat cruise. While admiring the steam engine on the lower level, Larry approached and said
"It looks like it could use some refactoring"
"Oh, what would you do?"
"I don't know but it looks like Perl 4 to me"
It might be a little off as beer was being consumed but that's the gist of it.
I also met up with Casey and let him know how much I enjoyed his presentations, and complimented his speaking ability. We discussed my presentation briefly and he relayed to me his experience of giving a Beginning Class::DBI talk at OSCON the previous year.
The TPF auction was a lot of fun. Unlike OSCON 2004 there were no team bids, services offered for auction, nor auctioning off the auctioneer's shirt (thankfully). The auction consisted of a lot of books. Which was both good and bad. I managed to pick up 3 books and was in a bidding war over a fourth until I backed out. Trush somehow managed to get in a bidding war over Searching for Stupidity and for some reason seemed upset that he lost.
After the the boat cruise a group of us headed back to C'est What? to have a couple beers. This is where I discovered a fondness for wheat beer. Another very late night.
I may get to posting about Day 3 but I seem to be taking a lot of time.
