I am now a PumpKing. No, not that kind of pumpking, this kind:

I stole the Perl Foundation logo and created a stencil from it using GIMP. It took me approximately 3 hours to create that pumpkin.

Happy Halloween!

Finding motivation lately has been more challenging than usual. My posts about perl have grown further apart. I have mostly slowed down working on my pet projects. I haven’t been reading my Perl related blogs anymore. Even writing this entry seems forced and unnatural. I hope this post is not picked up by the Ironman Perl planet due to the complete lack of any substantial content.

Don’t be mistaken, I am still interested in all of these things. I have a stack of interesting modules that I want to clean up and release. My feed reader is chock full Ironman Perl entries. I have 2 unfinished posts about Perl 5.

There are several reasons for my recent sloth. The summer is drawing to a near. I have a large list of honey-do items that need to be done around the house. Worst of all, I am working lots of overtime for some projects that are perpetually behind schedule and over-budget.

On the positive side, I have spent a majority of my summer learning about compilers, programming languages, and parsing grammars. I was really taken by the Topaz project, which has been a source of inspiration. I was also very impressed with the PGE presentation and discussion at the Parrot Virtual Machine Workshop.

I have exceeded my ability to maintain my attention about my own blog post. I’d say more about my next post but I just want to stop typing.

At YAPC::NA, Chip Salzenberg held a last minute brief talk that really started making me think. Well, to be honest, the thought process started at the Parrot Workshop but really began in this talk.

I’ve always been fascinated with programming languages and compilers. These things had always struck me as not academically challenging and basically a solved engineering problem. I never really did much in the area except for an undergraduate course where I wrote compiler for TinyC, written in Perl, with a MIPS assembler code generator backend. It was a study in recursive decent parsers, so it lacked any real semantic capabilities, such as symbol tables, garbage collector, or ASTs.

So anyways, back to how this relates to Chip’s laid back talk. Basically, he encouraged people to become core Perl hackers. “Yes, things are bad, but they’re not that bad.” The talk only lasted 20 minutes, but my brain started spinning for the rest of the day. I tried having a few conversations, but I failed to sustain anything more than a few minutes. The talk wasn’t overly special. It wasn’t groundbreaking or funny; it was clearly an impromptu presentation with slides obviously created quickly; it lacked substantial content and it was not thought provoking. It was the perfect talk at the perfect time because my brain was in the perfect state of mind to think clearly and creatively.

So I have since turned my attention away from my thesis for the summer and towards compilers and programming languages. I have started filling my research notebook with all sorts of ideas in the chance that I spark a true flash of genius. My advisor is likely to be annoyed that I decided to change directions radically but he went overseas for the summer and has stopped responding to email.

Thank you Chip, you may very well have ignited my imagination and passion to create something truly worthwhile.

I am officially booked for YAPC|10 in Pittsburg this year. I’m excited!

I’ll be staying in the dorms of CMU in a double occupancy room (all that was available). I’m leaving DFW at about 4:30pm on Friday 19 June 2009 and will arrive in PIT by 9:30pm. I’ll be taking the Port Authority shuttle from the airport, which is an astoundingly cheap $2.80.

I will be attending the Parrot Workshop on both Saturday and Sunday.

I have already lined out my schedule for the entire event, which I will need to see if I can post it or provide a link somehow. Maybe an import into Google Calendar is possible (anyone tried this?).

I’ll be leaving to go back to DFW on Wednesday at 3:45pm. It’s unfortunately a bit early but I need my wife to pick me up from the airport (public transportation in Dallas is terrible and expensive). I should only miss the lightning talks and the Closing so I’m not too disappointed.

Now I need to contact the university’s Computer Science Graduate department and the Pittsburgh runners club.