A Report on YAPC::NA 2006
Will Willis presented on his experience at YAPC::NA::2006 in Chicago, IL. This presentation was different in that it was more about the Perl community, it's strengths, weaknesses, and oddities, and less about programming.
Will took the group on a virtual tour through photos taken at and
around the conference. Not all of the ~200 pictures he snapped during
the 3 day excursion are online, a majority of them are available on
his flickr page. As a side note, the consensus at YAPC::NA::2006
was that those sharing and tagging images from this year's YAPC use
the tag, yapcna2006 to tag their photos, blogs, and other
taggable content. As of the time of this writing (July 13, 2006) 834 photos on
flickr are tagged with this tag.
Will explained how balanced the YAPC experience was for him. Many of the sessions covered new and innovative uses for Perl in the real world, with a heavy emphasis on web 2.0 topic like AJAX, website development frameworks, and JavaScript. Those attending the conference expecting to get a jump start into Perl weren't disappointed either, many tracks cover Perl basics, best practices, and common pitfalls. More advanced subjects like Perl in the enterprise, inside-out objects, and large-scale testing were also presented.
Jeremy Fluhmann, leader of BrazosValley.pm, made an appearance as well. Jeremy also went to YAPC::NA. He expanded a little on Will's coverage of the presentations and talked about the BOF (Birds of a Feather) meetings. Apparently, not all of the BOFs were related to Perl, including "Beers of the World" and others.
Jeremy also provided an update on the status of the YAPC::NA 2007 proposal for Houston. We talked a bit about the potential venues: University of Houston Downtown and Rice. Jeremy also reminded everyone that we are getting close to the cut-off date.
The notes and TODO items for the proposal are currently being updated on the wiki. The password for edit access is halpc.
