acme

Today was the first day of talks at YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga, Latvia. I arrived a few days ago and Riga is a beautiful town to walk around, full of restaurants and squares with outside tables to drink beer. I enjoyed walking around the main market, which is housed in ex-Zeppelin hangers.

The pre-conference meeting on Sunday was great, we slowly took over the main square here. It was nice to meet new people and see old faces.

This morning started with a quick walk through the park to get my ticket scanned and a badge (well, label) printed with my name on.

Andrew Shitov is the main organiser of this conference and he started off the conference with a welcome. A quick show of hands shows that this is the first YAPC for about half of the attendees.

Larry Wall then took us a quick tour of postmodernism of Perl 5 and Perl 6 with lots of photos of Riga.

Then the main conference started with five tracks of talks going on at the same time.

I attended the following:

Euclid, Socrates and Mill - Quality in Documentation, where Matt Trout talked about "Euclid's Elements, the Socratic Dialogue style, and Mill's work both on utilitarianism and libertarianism".

Oriental Perl for Enterprise, where Yusuke Kawasaki introduced "the usages of the modern Perl in the leading enterprise scene in Japan".

Bending syntax with 5.14, where Zefram explained how to extend the Perl syntax.

Rakudo Evolved: speed, feedback and hackability, Jonathan Worthington explained what he's been up to with the "6model", meta-programming framework in Rakudo.

Mostly lazy DBIx::Class testing, where Chisel Wright was indeed mostly lazy, talking about Test::DBIx::Class::Schema.

Why time is difficult, where Zefram entertained and scared us with the history of time and the various different types of "universal" times.

Smoking The Onion - Tales of CPAN Testers, where Barbie explained all the details of CPAN Testers.

I'm currently sitting in the lightning talks, which are all fun. Five minutes is a perfect length for a short talk.

There's an auction to follow and then I'm sure a bit of socialising. It's been a fun-packed day and there's two more days to come. Thanks to the organisers and speakers!