I must have arrived at the conference after most of the other attendees. The room was full and I ended up sitting on the floor against a wall at the back. I didn’t enjoy Larry’s keynote. Mainly because I’d heard most of it before. Larry showed a load of things in Perl 5 and then how they would look in Perl 6. I’ve seen Larry present a talk like this before and also seen both Damian and Allison give similar talks. This happens to me a lot at conferences. Maybe I should limit myself to one a year.

I also think that I had set my expectations too high. I was expecting the keynote to be more like the state of the onion talks that Larry gives at Oscon.

I did register for the conference at some point. This must have been a very smooth process as I don’t really remember much about it at all! I was probably too busy talking. The main reason I go to YAPC is to meet up with other people in the Perl community. And at the first coffee break there were so many different people I wanted to talk to.

I missed the first talk I wanted to see as I ended up in the wrong room. There was a printed schedule in the conference pack but the schedule had continued to change and the most up to date one was on the conference wiki. I don’t carry a laptop to conferences. I write my notes with pen and paper. Someone pointed out that the conferences organisers had printed out an up to date version of the schedule and put this on a notice board which meant I did get to the correct talks for the rest of the day.

I went to hear Scott talk about “The Legacy of Perl”. I managed to miss the start of the talk so I assume the first talk I heard ran over time. Scott’s talk didn’t go well. He was very nervous. I think it was the first time he had spoken at a conference and he had Larry Wall sitting in the front row. Scott was also one of the first people to speak after the keynotes which is never an easy thing to do.

I heard Barbie speak twice in the afternoon. I think I preferred his second talk “Preparing for CPAN“. Probably because this talk contained practical advice with easy to follow examples. Both of Barbie’s talks were well structured. I’ve been to quite a few talks in the past where there doesn’t appear to be any structure at all. I assume this happens because the speakers are so close to the subject that they don’t realise that their audience may not have the same understanding that they do.

The last talk I went to see was “Perl in secure web development”. This was also very clearly presented and I was surprised to learn that Jonathan hadn’t spoken at a conference before. Jonathan also submitted a paper [pdf] on this talk for the proceedings which is the only one I’ve taken the time to read.