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2017/06/19

Feeling "Tipsy": The Perl Conference 2017 Day 1

A few lessons learned before I dive into the talks I attended and what I gained from them:

  • I had figured that aspects of my Every Day Carry would not be appreciated in a government building, so I left my multitool off my belt, but, even after I had put everything I could think of into the tray, I had still made the machines go beep, causing the guards to pull out the wand. Tomorrow, pack lighter.
  • I take notes on a paper notebook, but I used my phone and tablet to connect to others via IRC and Twitter, as well as keeping track of my calendar, and I ran through my batteries before the end of the talks. In part, it was switching between the local WiFi and the cellular network, doing well with neither, but I'm not convinced it'd wouldn't be drained regardless. At lunch, I need to find a place to charge. I often come with a power strip for just this purpose, too.
  • I didn't break out the laptop once. If I don't use it more, I should just leave it and have less to carry.
Hopefully, I will remember this and come prepared for the next one.

Now, to the talks:

I started the day with MetaCPAN, the Grand Tour. I had been convinced earlier that MetaCPAN is better than CPAN for looking into modules, but there's more, including modules I am going to have start using to search CPAN.  

Graham Knop's Continuous Integration for CPAN followed. I had been aware of Travis-CI, and had become aware of AppVeyor recently, but the tooling available in Perl to work with these was less familiar to me. I was unaware that you can specify Linux or OSX in Travis, This was something I was thinking and asking questions of other developers about. I have issues on FreeBSD, which I'm told is something that Gitlab-CI can help me with, but somehow, I doubt I can connect Github to Gitlab, but I could be wrong.

Steven Lembark had much more with Dockerizing CPAN Testers: Running an Isolated Test Site than I could fit into my head, and I think I'll have to go back to the tape once it's available, but I think it's a useful addition to the world.

After lunch, I went to Joel Berger's Variables, Scoping and Namespaces, which he set as a talk for beginners. He went so far as to suggest more established developers go elsewhere. Since I never thought I learned all of Perl when I was learning, it was very much a lot of things I did already know, but a little "So that's why we do that", some more "Oooh. I forgot about that", and one weird trick that explains how to mock functions for tests.

(That, fundamentally, is my big item to work on as a developer. Testing.)

After this, I attended Matt S. Trout's ES6: Almost an acceptable Perl 5? and it gave me a sense of treating Javascript like Perl, but since I don't code Perl like Matt does, I probably won't code ES6 like Matt does. My notes peter out about halfway through, but they do include several gems, such as lodash, that might improve the code I do write.

Following this is Lightning Talks, which has a bunch of interesting points, going from "Write for OpenSource.com" to "Try learning Dart" to "Creating Test JSON from JSON Schemas" to "Using Instapaper, IFTTT and Buffer to tweet what you read" to the Alien modules, which I almost understand now. Or maybe not. Certainly, though, I'd be installing and trying Dave Rolsky's RTx-toGitHub right now if I wasn't so tired.

Finally, Sawyer X talked about Perl 5.26 and the changes that came and the changes that are coming. The thing that comes to mind first is that things that have been deprecated since 5.0 are finally being pulled. I understand the critics who think that removing . from @INC is insignificant, but I am still for it. I also like that Perl recognizes unhandled merges and dies now. 

Tomorrow, I will be learning about Dancer, Test2 and more with @INC, and visiting with family after

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