Don Vito Perleone

The Alps, Western region. Northern Switzerland. Halfway between Zurich and Basel. Here you can find Olten, a nice little city which these last few days had an unusually high concentration of Perl aficionados roaming its streets. I'm talking about this year's Swiss Perl Workshop, the second incantation ever, and a very successful one.

I flew in on Thursday, luckily Swissair has plenty of affordable direct flights from northern Germany to its main hub in Zurich. From there it's less than an hour by train to Olten. The workshop started on Friday with brian d foy himself, he presented his keynote (keynoted, keynoticed, keynotified?) on Whitespace in the Perl Community, where he drew our attention to the not yet cultivated virtual fields.

There are already other reports on the talks (with a slight Mojo vibe) and the location. So I'll just pick out my personal highlights. On day one, Liz gave a reprise of her "C-Day is Coming" from YAPC::EU, setting a few things straight on the state of Perl 6. I also took the opportunity to further enliven my chromebook's lid. The erstwhile solitary onion on the silvery surface is now adorned by four nice little camels. Kudos for that to the Perl marketing juggernaut, otherwise known as Wendy. The day ended with a dinner, crowned by a lovely dessert combination, which featured an unbelievable chocolate mousse, amongst other things. Once again the strategy of using family members for the catering has proven to be highly successful.

Day two had a somewhat different layout, besides the talk track there were one or two parallel workshop tracks. I went to Paul Johnson's Devel::Cover tutorial. You can't do much better than have a module's or tool's author holding a workshop. All the answers can be gotten straight from the source. Plus, Paul is one of the nicest people you could ever want to meet. The workshop's conclusion was "Drinks and cleaning the house", which ended with a very pleasant round of chatting with several attendees, including Perl event stalwarts Liz and Wendy, and some Swissky and other assorted beverages. All in all it was an experience well worth repeating next year. The two organizers Roman and Matthias plus their catering family members deserve most of the praise.

[Part 2 will come from Mozart's home town.]