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.

So last Friday I flew out to Pittsburgh to attend my first YAPC::NA. In fact, it was my first technical conference ever really. I met many people, drank lots of coffee, explored Carnegie Mellon, and enjoyed tons of perl presentations.

A few of the presentations made an impression on me. Rather than try and discuss each of them in a single post, I’ll post my reaction over the course of the summer. The best thing about YAPC was that it sparked my imagination. I had several good ideas, one of which I may pursue further in an academic setting.

I also took lots of pictures so I tried getting my photo gallery functioning again. Unfortunately, the permalink function in NextGen seems to have changed so my pace charts probably are non-functional. Things are looking good and I hope to post some interesting pictures.

The dinner Tuesday night was the best part. The Perl Foundation bought us dinner at Heinz field. Dinner was excellent and the desserts were even better (some sort of cookie-like pie). There was a tour of the field; I stood on the endzone and sat in Hines Ward’s and Brett Keisel’s locker. Interestingly enough, I also found out that the FBI has an office in the scoreboard and use facial recognition software to find wanted criminals in the crowd (they even send them free tickets).

I also attended the Parrot Workshop and met Jerry Gay (particle) and Jeff Horwitz and Andrew Whitworth (Whiteknight). I tried to convince Michael Schwern (schwern) to finally abandon ExtUtils::MakeMaker. I finally met chromatic and discussed how I feel infrequent releases of perl are what’s making it look stale. I had a long enjoyable conversation with Patrick Michaud (pm) at the auction dinner about school and life. I met Larry Wall (TimToady) which was much less dramatic than I imagined it would be. I had dinner with Matt Trout (mst) and it was surprisingly depressing. Lastly, I hung out with my good buddy fRew.

All in all, it was a good experience to socialize and network as well as craft a few really good ideas. YAPC::NA 11 will be in Columbus Ohio. Considering what I spent, I don’t think I want to go next year strickly because of the location unless my employer foots the bill. I really enjoyed attending and hope to attend a future event. Thanks to the event coordinators for all of their hard work and for the presenters for sharing their knowledge.

I am writing this in an auditorium on Carnegie Mellon University. This is the official start of YAPC and I am waiting for the keynote speeches.

I ate dinner with Larry Wall last night (well, sat near him). I spent the last 2 days in a Parrot workshop with a handful of parrot implementers.

I’m excited what the next few days will bring. Being social is much easier with other people who share interests. Ironically, perl mongers are very social people.

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.

It’s pretty obvious that I have been neglecting this space lately. It’s been well over 2 months since I last posted anything, and that was one of those annoying “updating things” updates.

Well, I’ve decided to partake in the Iron Man perl blogging challenge. Once a week, every week, I will post something, anything, about perl. This should be easy because it’s basically all I’ve been programming in lately and it’s easily my favorite language. My official start post is right now.

I’m working on an interesting new library that I’d like to think can change things in a big way for the open source community. I’m working on this with a fellow perl6 monger. Oh, you didn’t catch that? Yeah, I helped start the first Perl 6 Mongers group, right here in Dallas. DFW.pm is basically defunct; one of the problems that plagued it was the venue. Rather than trying to cater to everyone across this horribly sprawled metroplex, I think it would be best to just focus on a few key areas. We may rename it later, but Dallas.p6m seems fitting.

Speaking of which, I will be attending YAPC::NA 2009. My wife and I will treat this as our mini-vacation, since we haven’t taken one in 2 years! I contemplated giving a talk, but I decided I’m too new to this whole presentation thing and I’m not sure I have anything to really say. Hopefully next year I will have something interesting to give a lecture or talk over.

The semester is almost over and I’m still swamped to the gills. I’ve been neglecting everything lately due to the overwhelming amount of work I’ve been assigned. I will be really happy to make it through to the summer for some time off. I’ll still be working on my thesis, but that’s not nearly as pressing as normal class deadlines (unless you advisor makes you redo stuff right before you defend).