[Van-pm] My YAPC::NA round up

[Scott McWhirter]

Hey all,

As you may know, a few of us van.pm-ers went along to YAPC::NA in
Pittsburgh this year.

It was a great conference and had many enjoyable moments, but I'll
iterate on a few of my favourites:

* Doing my talk was very enjoyable and it seemed to spur some interest
and activity from people in regards to testing and automation. We've
seen a contribution or two coming to Test::A8N based directly on
response from the talk, so bonus!

* About a third of the 250 attendees to the conference this year had
never been to a YAPC before, so it was encouraging to see signs of a
renewed interest in all things perl.

* Drinking with Matt Trout and Ilmari until 6am one night at a random
Pittsburgh bar. Had only expected to have a few, but the folks in
Pittsburgh were damn friendly and was an enjoyable night, even if it
meant a noticable hangover in the morning.

* Moose hackathon: I haven't been able to do any moose core hacking of
late, but i had spare tuits and had fun with the moose core guys at
doing stuff that was on the TODO list, but that folks hadn't had the
tuits to do. Hopefully it'll help with some of the speed/core
improvements coming down the line.

* Seeing luke, lando and stash: was great to see friends, have a laugh
and talk about all things perl.

* Signing up to become a member of the Enlightened Perl Organisation:
Mark Keating and Chris Prather convinced me of the reasons and I
jumped on board. Might have more to say on that later.

* Attending a lot of testing talks and chatting with a bunch of the
folks who work on the testing infrastructure.

* Seeing quite a number of people I haven't seen in years along with
meeting people IRL for the first time, even though I've know them for
years.

* Perl Workshop: After having chatted with friends and a few people
who've organized these, I've been convinced that we should try to
organize one in Vancouver. I talked to a bunch of the regular perl
speakers and all of them have said they'd _love_ to come to Vancouver
to do talks for us. I'll look at this more when I get back, but I'll
need a chunk of help on this front.

Hopefully luke, lando and stash will dump about their favourite parts
of the conference too!

ta!


-- 
-Scott McWhirter- | -Technology Consultant-
[ Cloudtone Studios - http://www.cloudtone.ca ]