The Game Crafter is a Perl-shop that allows anyone to create their own board game or card game. The website and the backend code is in Perl. It's providing Perl jobs, and more important, Perl initiative. It shows not only that Perl is alive and well, but that it creates some of the more fun things that are going on.

They were at YAPC::NA 2012 and provided game night with lots of board decks (many of which were given away) and board games for all of us to play.

There is a competition to get $250,000 (!!) of sponsorship for startups.…

At YAPC::NA 2012 I gave a talk about Moose, and I've uploaded the slides.

The talk was fairly successful and people approached me later and said they enjoyed it and found it very useful. I'm happy to hear that. I hope they will help you too. :)

If you have any questions regarding the slides, please let me know. The video should follow at some point.

I was told color-blind people might have trouble with some red on green emphasis in the slides. Do not worry, slideshare shows the entire text under the slid…

After seeing the Bingo card idea at an Atheist conference, I suggested it to JT Smith, who decided it was indeed a good idea. JT did the design, thought of the tasks and wrote down the rules and printed it. When people came to YAPC::NA 2012, they got a cool bingo card with their swag bag and had to mark things off.

I don't know how many did indeed do it, but I did. The idea is simple: by putting some things as a fun task, it motivates you into doing it. I know I'm per…

In my lightning talk at the end of YAPC, I had mentioned a few details about roommates I've had. This included weird/funny/surprising/scary details.

I'd first like to express (and I tried doing it in the lightning talk even though I was running out of time doing two talks in under 5 minutes) that these are people I respect, and had pleasure meeting and spending time with. Please do not assume for one second that if I could do it again I would do it differently. I wouldn't.

More importantly, I was told that perhaps one of my comments (relating to the sexual preference of a pers…

So you're sitting at home, preparing for a karaoke night, waiting for your friend to arrive. She comes in, rings the doorbell and you're thinking "fuck! I'm upstairs, and she's downstairs and I have to open the door for her (because it's locked) but I'm busy changing my clothes." What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

What if you could let her in using you phone while you're still upstairs getting yourself ready? Arduino could be used for that. And the following is a theoretical (and slightly bit practical) explanation on how you could use Arduino and Dancer to accomplish this.

Ardui…

So I'm in Madison, Wisconsin for YAPC::NA 2012. Yesterday, I was supposed to meet up at one of the hackathons. I went to the Pyle building and searched the rooms and even accidentally went into brian's workshop (sorry brian!).

When I got to the hackathon room, it was pretty quiet but active. I had met Robert Blackwell two days prior at a dinner and had a lovely conversation and fun time with him. Robert had brought a ton of hardware (11 hours drive!!) and set up an entire room just so we could hack on hardware. Wait. Hardware?

At this point, I should probably mention I'm not a…