First day at YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev

Today was the first "real" day of YAPC Europe 2013 in Kiev. In the same sense that it was the first real day, we had quite a nice "unreal" conference day yesterday, with a day-long Perl 6 hackathon, and in the evening a pre-conference meeting a Sovjet-style restaurant with tasty food and beverages.

The talks started with a few words of welcome, and then the announcement that the YAPC Europe next year will be in Sofia, Bulgaria, with the small side note that there were actually three cities competing for that honour. Congratulations to Sofia!

Larry's traditional keynote was quite emotional, and he had to fight tears a few times. Having had cancer and related surgeries in the past year, he still does his perceived duty to the Perl community, which I greatly appreciate.

Afterwards Dave Cross talked about 25 years of Perl in 25 minutes, which was a nice walk through some significant developments in the Perl world, though a bit hasty. Maybe picking fewer events and spending a bit more time on the selected few would give a smoother experience.

Another excellent talk that ran out of time was on Redis. Having experimented a wee bit with Redis in the past month, this was a real eye-opener on the wealth of features we might have used for a project at work, but in the end we didn't. Maybe we will eventually revise that decision.

Ribasushi talked about how hard benchmarking really is, and while I was (in principle) aware of that fact that it's hard to get right, there were still several significant factors that I overlooked (like the CPU's tendency to scale frequency in response to thermal and power-management considerations). I also learned that I should use Dumbbench instead of the Benchmark.pm core module. Sadly it didn't install for me (Capture::Tiny tests failing on Mac OS X).

The Perl 6 is dead, long live Perl 5 talk was much less inflammatory than the title would suggest (maybe due to Larry touching on the subject briefly during the keynote). It was mostly about how Perl 5 is used in the presenter's company, which was mildly interesting.

After tasty free lunch I attended jnthn's talk on Rakudo on the JVM, which was (as is typical for jnthn's talk) both entertaining and taught me something, even though I had followed the project quite a bit.

Thomas Klausner's Bread::Board by example made me want to refactor the OTRS internals very badly, because it is full of the anti-patterns that Bread::Board can solve in a much better way. I think that the OTRS code base is big enough to warrant the usage of Bread::Board.

I enjoyed Denis' talk on Method::Signatures, and was delighted to see that most syntax is directly copied from Perl 6 signature syntax. Talk about Perl 6 sucking creativity out of Perl 5 development.

The conference ended with a session of lighning talks, something which I always enjoy. Many lightning talks had a slightly funny tone or undertone, while still talking about interesting stuff.

Finally there was the "kick-off party", beverages and snacks sponsored by booking.com. There (and really the whole day, and yesterday too) I not only had conversations with my "old" Perl 6 friends, but also talked with many interesting people I never met before, or only met online before.

So all in all it was a nice experience, both from the social side, and from quality and contents of the talks. Venue and food are good, and the wifi too, except when it stops working for a few minutes.

I'm looking forward to two more days of conference!

(Updated: Fixed Thomas' last name)