byterock

Well end of day two here and had a nice walk and a nice chat with one of the local city counselors who was out glad handing I asked her when the Gardiner Express Way will be fixed up. She said by Christmas ;)

That was a Local joke now onto what I got up to today.

Ovid despite Air Frances best efforts actually did make in to the conference late the night before so he was able to give his Keynote on OO in the Perl Core, Seems we will be getting something called Corinna Soon we will have Field, Class, Role and Method to play with and if you are brave you can get the latest version of perl and play with a few parts of it. The key sticky part is Typing, Seems there is another project out there called Oshum to handle all those nasty typing problems. Well to quote the main character Sweden's best know literature

'We shall see, what we shall see'

Next there was a talk by Dimitrios Kechaglas who gave some very good insights into how important it is to at least try to do a little optimization to your code. The best takeaway was do the obvious stuff first 'Profile' your code and then make the decision if that last 3% is worth the effort. On the technical side of things I did take away one lesson on the proper way to call encode for dealing with UTF8 will have to give it a try on my code base once I get back to the office, but I will have to do some profiling first.

Lunch was next and I took the opportunity to visit a few haunts from the last time I spent any time In The Big Smoke, and I guess one cannot relive one's youth, as nothing much remains of the few hot-spots I visited so many years ago.

Well Cam Beaudoin was up next and his talk on why Disability inclusion was important to even us programmers, seems we all benefit when an accommodation is made for someone, I will think of this each time I have two coffees in my hand and press the automatic door when I go into a building. Not only do we all benefit physicaly but this sort of inclusion brings different perspectives that may benefit the bottom line.

Lee J put down his camera for a few mins and gave a talk on Continuous Deployment , seems we have gotten it right where we work as we follow most of what Lee was suggestion but there was one good takeaway, Organizations of medium sized will have to be much more careful with the CI process. When something goes South, and it will happen, a small organizations can recover quickly simply because they are small, the large one might be able to stop mid process before everything comes down so they still have something up and running. However with a medium organization you can neither recover quickly or stop half way though. Something to think on.

Next was a new one on me a pre-recorded presentation, Paul Evans gave a What's New talk on Perl 5.38. Unfortunately Paul recorded his presentation while the M1 was busy so it was sometimes hard to hear, Paul might want to talk to Cam about accommodations ;), anyway it was neat to see what was coming seems Ovid's OO stuff is there an works, Paul even was online after the canned talk for a few remote questions.

Just for fun, and it was, I attended Gene Boggs presentation on 'Algorithmic Music' It seems that Perl can sing or at lest produce MIDI muzak. The funny thing is his little perl programs have great potential for teaching and learning tools, will have to look into that later.

Finally Aadharsh Hariharan presented on the academic work he has been pursuing for his Masters degree. Seems he was the one conducting that Perl survey that was put out some time ago, He presents a good model of what the results of the survey was and some follow on interviews, and no real surprise here we in the Perl community have some work to do, but at least with the model he produced we can measure if we are having any progress in getting Perl back into the mainstream again. An important step IMHO.

Anyway time review my slides one more time for my talk tomorrow.