I seem to have started a whole controversy. I feel like I should be blushing: all this attention is probably assigning far more importance to my opinions than I deserve.

First, a recap: There were a couple of blog posts about pre-modern Perl.  Then I responded with a bit of a defense of post-modern Perl.  This engendered a lot of comments; certainly more comments than I’ve ever had on any of my other blog posts (in fact, more than twice as many as the previous record-holders).  Then the author of the post that initiated the discussion made a fuller response.

Lately we’ve seen a couple of blog posts about “pre-modern Perl.” The core idea seems to be that older Perls (say, 5.6, or perhaps even 5.005) are perfectly good for many jobs.  Which, of course, they are.  I’m not sure anyone ever said they weren’t.

Although the authors tend to downplay it in the comments, the articles are also leavened with a bit of ... shall we say, dis…

Well, I’ve just gotten back from my second YAPC, and I thought I’d take a moment to share a few reflections.

First, general thoughts: I had an excellent time.  I knew far more people than I had the first time, which is partially just having met a bunch of folks in 2011, and partially because more of my current and former coworkers were in attendance.  Plus I met a whole lot of new people, so now I’ll know even more folks next time.  This is nice for me, as I’m one of those weird half-introvert-half-extrovert people.  I’m not much for walking up to people I’ve never met before and starting a conversation.  On the other hand, if I already know you, you can’t get me to shut up.  So, the more people I know, the more people I’m likely to meet.

I also spoke for the first time (the first time at YAPC, I mean).  This encouraged a lot of people to come up to me and just start chatting, which is nice, as it removes the burden of conversation initiation from me and I’m forced to just go with the flow or seem like a jerk, which I’m not.  (Well, not most of the time.  To people I just met, anyway.  People who know me well: just shut up.) So, overall, socially this was a good conference for me.

Occasionally I give presentations.  Most often at work, but sometimes at my local PerlMongers.  Typically, a presentation is accompanied by some sort of slideshow.  And there are many, many different applications out there to create slideshows in.  Power Point is sort of the default of these, and I’ve used it before, and it sucks.  Google Docs Presentations uses the same basic model, and I’ve used that before too, and it sucks slightly less ... but it still sucks.  I just want some basic slides with a little bit of code on it, and maybe some text, but mostly in the “header” category.  I don’t like text-heavy slides.  You end up just reading your slides to people, most of whom can actually read themselves, and tend to be a bit insulted when you feel the need to do it for them.