YAPC NA 2008 - Day 1

Groggy as heck, I dragged myself to Hermann Hall to meet Jen and Alvin.

The first day of the conference was pretty boring. The whole morning was dedicated to the newbie's guide speeches such as:
Karen Pauley - The Bluffer’s Guide to the Perl Community - OK.
José Castro - How to get the most out of a YAPC - Good.
Josh McAdams - Welcome to YAPC::NA 2008 - To the point.

But: Jim Brandt - TPF Annual Report - is interesting, and Larry - Keynote - was surprising since Larry gave a technical presentation. No philosophy speech? ... Yawn ...

[Lunch alone since I needed to work: fixing RFT code].

Next 2 were alright, nothing new if you have wrangled code for 10+ years:
Michael Schwern - Skimmable Code: Fast to Read, Fast to Change
Fred Moyer - Handling the Ball of Mud

I was only interested in Adam Kennedy's session on Strawberry Perl - Achieving Win32 Platform Equality, it pretty much stroke an accord with me, since I too, experienced problems with ActiveState's PPM library. If I couldn't find any of the PPM that I want at uwinnipeg, I considered myself out of luck. Hopefully, I could managed to make Strawberry Perl works.

I couldn't decide which last speech I should attend, but I finally picked: Chris Dolan - PAR + FUSE + PDF - I found the explanation of FUSE and the PDF data structure very interesting.

After the sessions, I went to eat @ Bubba Gump in Navy Pier with Bruce Gray, Jen, Alvin and Suda.