domm

Last weekend I spend a few nice days in the Netherlands, thanks to the Dutch Perl Workshop 2011. It took place in Den Haag at the very cool Relevation Space (the pinball machines! the Space Invaders carpet! the LackRacks!)

I took the slow way to get there, i.e. a sleeper train to Köln (I got lucky and was alone in my two-person sleeping compartment), a short train ride to Aachen, where I was picked up by Liz & Wendy (thanks a lot!). On the way to Echt we stopped at some comic book/music store, where I got me some second hand 7"/10" dub vinyls (nice!). We packed the worlds biggest collection of Perl books and the giant stuffed camel (whose name I forgot..) into a car and had a rather cramped ride up to Den Haag. The evening was spend with setting up the venue, playing pinball & Fluxxx. And Cider...

I had a few talks on Saturday, for two of which I even managed to write some slides for: Stuwercal and the Feel like I'm fixing to test-talk. Even though several of the talks where Dutch, I could at least get the basic gist of everything (as the content was Perl-related, I could make out what they were talking about from the slides - and it also helped that Dutch sounds like a mixture of English and German...)

All talks were interesting, but I liked Hardcore bug reporting by Carl Mäsak best, mostly because he had the most shiny slides... Just before the lightning talk session I tried to revivify my two year old SDL-based SpaceInvader game, but failed, because current SDL is so much nicer than what it used to be (thanks to garu & kthakore, see also here).

The rest of the evening was spend chatting with fellow Perl hackers from around the world, eating Chinese takeaway food, more pinball & airhockey and of course more Fluxxx. And Whiske?y...

On Sunday I took a train to Amsterdam and spend the afternoon in their wonderful new public library, at some bookshops & record stores, before catching my train back home.

It was a very nice Workshop, thanks again to all the organizers!