Wendy

The end of the Perl QA Hackathon 2013 in Lancaster was as busy as it started. My drive to Manchester Airport with 3 hackers was enjoyable. I dropped two of them of at the airport and the third one at a lovely small hotel/b&b near the airport. The drive back was filled with Sevendust, rather loud, nice heavy metal, missed that for days.

Just before we left we were told to our big surprise that at 17:00 the building had to be empty, because of university rules. So nobody had time to do a standup and tell what they accomplished. So no list is made. Yet. Bit of a strange ending to an otherwise well-organised meeting. I hope the accomplishments will be collected and publicised in other ways, because it was a lot.

Back in Lancaster I went to Wetherspoon, the restaurant next to our hotel: Liz texted me she was there with the crowd. Still a busy crowd. The hackathon just continued there. I had two amazingly interesting conversations.

First a talk with ribasushi, XDG and DG about what needs to be done in Perl 6 before they would consider that interesting. I made a list and will discuss it with others. It was exciting because for the first time I met some hardcore Perl 5 people who were willing to tell me what really was missing.

Second talk was with Salve about writing a Perl 6 book. Well, two books: one for beginning adult programmers, learning them to become developers. The other for children, maybe teenagers. I had the idea of writing a book for a long time, but since I love to write but am a bad programmer, I realised I could never do it alone. Well, teaming up might be a good idea. Now we need a teacher who is also a programmer to complete the team. And another idea I had (thanks Leila for reminding me) is to involve some native speakers in other languages (French, German, Russian, English, etc) to instantly translate what was written by the core writers. And they will function as proofreaders, commentators, contributors, co-authors. So maybe that is my near future task...

The end of the Sunday evening was very social and very nice. We went to a bar that is the regular hangout for Matt Trout. He was there. Jay. Long time no see. Hugs!!! Way too long since I saw him, talked with him. And lots of beer. For some people "Berliner Weisse mit Schuss" is a well-know drink (German white beer with some red or green syrup). This bar had it's own "Pink" with white beer, some strong syrup and topped with Guinness, 9% alcohol. Lovely taste.

Sitting outside in april on a cold evening with some 15 to 20 nerds was special enough. Matt Trout helped to make it thunderous with laughter.

After closing time we were kicked out, but Matt knew a nice place. So there we were with 15 nerds in a place filled with local youths which were clothed to party all night. Most of them sexy. Or what they thought was sexy. Anyway, at some point I was invited to dance with dolmen. I did, for over an hour. Now muscle ache. Ouch. He is a good dancer, I am not, but it was fun.

Today Liz and I drove back from Lancaster to home. Yeah, we're safe, our house is OK (thanks neighbours!!!) and our cat is fine.

The people from Lancaster told us that there are no more nice record shops in Lancaster. But I found one nearby in Preson: Action Records. Excellent selection of music, ranging from jazz and blues to prog rock and superheavy heavy metal. Liz and I were happy.

Liz told me about her meeting about Perl 6 modules. Result: in the near future it will be possible to upload them to CPAN. Nice breakthrough for Perl 6.