Yet Another Perl Conference A Week Away

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:22:24 +0000

YAPC:NA 2006 takes place June 26th-28th in Chicago, with Larry Wall and Damian Conway providing the keynotes that will sandwich the conference’s events and talks.

There are a couple of things I can point to in my off and on times doing programming that stand out for me. One of them was having the top performing project in my Perl class’ “Prisoner’s Dilemma” competition.

Work had kept me from writing anything extensive, so I bashed out a short program that randomly chose to hold out or talk depending on what the other “prisoner” previously did. Somehow my little 10-line program won by nearly 10,000 days over the second place program.

As Perl advocates already know, there’s more than one way to accomplish something with the language. A bunch of those people will get together in Chicago next week to attend the YAPC:NA 2006.

Wall will deliver the opening keynote, while Object Oriented Perl author Conway provides the closing address. A number of sponsors, Google and O’Reilly among them, appear on the home page in support of the various conference events.

Each conference day starts at 8:30 am and ends at 5 pm. Events vary from novice-oriented talks on avoiding common pitfalls (you did remember the shebang, didn’t you?) to adopting Ajax as a Perl programmer for website development, to talks on Perl 6 and Parrot.

Bloggers with technical inclinations may be interested in Jonathan Rockway’s talk about blogging software based on the Catalyst module. A synopsis of the talk appears on the conference site:

My new Catalyst-based weblog software uses the filesystem as a backing store and PGP as authentication. It breaks the usual web application paradigm (SQL backend, password and cookies for authentication), and introduces technologies that aren’t well documented elsewhere; Crypt::OpenPGP, File::ExtAttr, etc. Includes a brief survey of the individual components, and then a demonstration of how they work together to make a blog that knows who you are but never requires registration.

Attendees who prefer quicker events will like the Lightning Talks to be held on Wednesday the 28th. These five-minute talks will see 16 speakers each take the stage to talk about anything related to Perl, good, bad, or just plain confused.

While quite a few attendees will probably show up for the arrival dinner, a few contrarian souls have put up an announcement for an “anti-arrival” dinner instead, to take place at an alternate location. But that doesn’t seem to have the support the arrival dinner at the Goose Island has.

Also, The Perl Foundation will conduct an auction on Tuesday the 27th. Among the items up for bids: a week at the Big Nerd Ranch. There will also be a silent auction, with an emphasis on “silent” as the website noted talkers will be either “taken out, lined up against a wall, and be shot” or “forced to code in Cobol or Python.”

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

WebProNews » yapcna2006

Yet Another Perl Conference A Week Away