Here I am, alone in my hotelroom in hotel Hangelar. Writing slides. Writing slides for my wxPerl tutorial tomorrow. I had none yesterday evening, which is A Bad Thing. Also My Own Fault. I heard from davorg that he had some 150 slides. Which scared the hell out of me. How could I possibly write 150 slides in 1 day? But as we talked about it, I realized I don't need 150 slides. It's a 3 hour tutorial, and I won't use 1 slide per minute. The first two hours I will do theory, presenting the class step-by-step examples and walking through them, and in the last hour I want to build a wxPerl application along with the class. But I still have to think of what to build....
Anyway. I arrived tuesday evening in Hotel Hangelar and after I drank some beers with kane, kudra, Pete Sergeant, Nicholas Clark and some others (of which I don't remember the names, sorry guys, I'm bad at names), I went upstairs preparing my pVoice talk for wednesday.
So yesterday we were up (at least downstairs at breakfast) around 9:45 (just in time...we can only have breakfast here until 10:00) and around 11 we (kudra, kane and I) went to the campus where the actual conference is being held. It was nice to meet old friends again there and nice to meet new people too. The morning program started earlier (around 9) with tutorials I didn't want to attend (I had seen Mark Overmeer's Tk tutorial at YAPC::Europe in Amsterdam), so after lunch I attended the welcome, followed by the "Extreme Perl" talk by Damian Conway. It was really funny. After that I started concentrating on my pVoice talk which was at that time only 1 talk away.
At 16:50 I started my pVoice talk. And boy was I nervous. The audience surely has noticed. I just hadn't expected this amount of people (some 150) to attend it. Last year at YAPC::Europe there were less than 30 people and I expected approximately the same number here. But I had forgotten that there was only one track of talks in the afternoon, so unless someone is really not interested in the subject, he or she just stayed in the room. Because I had slides (yeah....I had them for this talk!) I told most of the story I wanted to tell, but I left out quite some things just because I was too nervous. Also my English was quite bad I think. But at least the message came through. People understood what I was talking about, and there were questions afterwards, and after the talk some people came to me to suggest some things to help me out, which of course made me very happy.
The last talk of the day - "Programming in Latin" by Damian - was also a VERY good one. Too bad my Latin is no good, otherwise I would have understood much more of it, but the way he explained it and what he built was so scaringly good....it's no wonder he's talking everywhere around the world.
Yesterday evening we went to a castle and had a dinner there, sponsored by O'Reilly. It was a magnificent castle and good food. I sat at a table with acme, DJ Adams (right?), davorg, kane and kudra -- one of the few english language tables ;-)
Today I won't see any talks because of the preparation of my own for tomorrow. Which is sad, because I wanted to see Damian's "Programming in Perl 6", Dave Cross' "Idiotic Perl" and Leon Brocard's "Inside Parrot" talks. But I just can't afford giving a tutorial tomorrow and not being prepared.
Mental note to self: start earlier with preparing your talks
...start earlier with preparing your talks
