tobez

(cross-posted from blog.tobez.org)

Ignat Ignatov talked about physical formulas. When I was planning to attend this talk, I thought it is going to be some sort of symbolic formulas computation, possibly with an analysis of dimensions of the physical quantities. However, despite my (a bit long in the tooth) background in physics, I did not understand a word of it. Apparently, some sort of unification of physical formulas, not entirely unlike the periodic table in chemistry, was presented, with almost no comprehensible details and with scary words like co-homology and algebraic topology. The fact that half of the slides were in Russian, while irrelevant for me personally, probably did not help matters for the majority of the people in the audience. I did not expect any questions at the end of the talk, but there were at least two, so I was probably wrong about general level of understanding in the audience.

Laurent Dami talked about SQL::Abstract::FromQuery. He presented a query form of the Request Tracker and said that it is too complex - a premise many would agree with. The conclusion was that some more natural way to allow the user to specify complex queries is needed. Surprizingly, the answer to that was to use a formal grammar and make the user adhere to it. To me this sounds weird, but if one can find a non-empty set of users that would tolerate this, it may just work.

Denis Banovic talked about Docker, a virtualization container. I did not know much about Docker until this point, so it was useful to have someone to explain it to me.

The next talk was long, 50 minutes (as opposed to a somewhat standard for this conference 20 minutes) Peter "ribasushi" Rabbitson presented a crash-course in SQL syntax and concepts. It looked like a beginner-level introduction to SQL, but it became better and better as it progressed. I even learned a thing or two myself. ribasushi has a way of explaining rather complicated things concisely, understandably, and memorizably at the same time. Excellent talk.

Then there was a customary Subway sandwiches lunch.

Naim Shafiyev talked about network infrastructure automatization. Since this is closely related to what I do at my day job, I paid considerable attention to what he had to say. I did not hear anything new, but hopefuly the rest of the audience found the talk more useful. It did inspire me to submit a lightning talk though.

osfameron talked about immutable data structures in Perl and how to clone them with modifications, while making sure that the code does not look too ugly. Pretty standard stuff for functional languages, but pretty unusual in the land of Perl. The presentation was lively, with a lot of funny pictures and Donald duck examples.

The coffee break was followed by another session of lightning talks, preceeded by a give-away of a number of free books for the first-time YAPC attendees. Among the talks I remembered were SQLite virtual tables support in Perl by Laurent Dami, web-based database table editor by Simun Kodzoman, LeoNerd's presentation about XMPP replacement called Matrix, a Turing-complete (even if obfuscated) templating system by Jean-Baptiste Mazon of Sophia (sp!), and annoucements of Nordic Perl Workshop 2014 (Helsinki, November) and Nordic Perl Workshop 2015 (Oslo, May).

Again, I did not go to the end-of-the-day keynote.

As a side note, the wireless seemed to be substantially more flaky than yesterday, which has affected at least some lightning talk presenters.