Pittsburgh, Perl, and Working in Shops

I found out about the fact that I would be giving two talks at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop this week about 2 weeks ago and have been working frantically to get my stuff together since. Well… at least, I worked frantically for the last week. The first week, was not quite frantic. It was more like somewhat diligent, but I did spend a couple nights playing Zelda that should have been spent prepping. Anyway, I got my talks done and I don’t think they were particularly excellent, but I don’t think they went badly (at least, I hope they didn’t). But, this post isn’t really about my talks so much as it is about debriefing PPW 2008. On to the festivities…

Travel To

It all started on a completely average Friday morning of packing… okay, skipping ahead. I flew to Pittsburgh through Milwaukee. In Milwaukee, I was supposed to take a late flight from there, but that wasn’t supposed to me I took off from Milwaukee after midnight. However, the flight the airplane hadn’t even taken off yet from Dallas when we landed. So, I worked more on my slides which weren’t quite finished while I waited. And waited. Finally, the plane arrived and took me to Pittsburgh, where I landed around 2am.

Strange thing about the flight, though. There were only 5 actual passengers on an Embraer 170. For those of you that aren’t airplane fanatics (like me), that’s a plane that seets about 70. There were two flight attendants, the pilot and copilot, and another 4 or 5 airline personnel catching a ride to Pittsburgh. That’s all.

I was the only one that had a checked bag. Uh-oh. When I got off the plane, a baggage handler was asking each of the 5 real passengers if they checked a bag and I said, “Yes.” He said he’d meet me at baggage claim. He met me there, but with no bag. It was lost. Poop. I almost never check a bag and this time I did. Dumb. Oh well.

So, I catch a cab and go on to the hotel and finally get to sleep sometime after 3am.

PPW Saturday

My phone alarm woke me up around 7am. Yeesh. I felt like something scraped off the bottom the mattress, but I got up and showered and got some coffee. I am in a hotel about 1.5 miles from the conference, so I figured I walked. I think this was a good thing as it helped me wake up a bit and it has been a glorious weekend in Pennsylvania. I stopped off to get some antiperspirant and some Listerine breath strips to minimize in odious scents I might be emitting since I was lacking my toiletries.

I made it to Wean Hall on CMU campus and promptly picked up my conference T-shirt and took it to the bathroom to exchange it for the mildly damp shirt I had been wearing that had probably picked up odors from a shuttle bus, three airports, two airplanes, and a cab, not to mention a 35 minute walk on a warm morning with a 30 pound backpack. Okay, so with new shirt donned and odor opposing chemicals applied to my underarms and mouth, I went in to the keynote on Perl 6 in progress.

Perl 6

The keynote was by Patrick Michaud and the news for Perl 6 is good! Yay! For anyone who has followed the drama of Perl 6, you know that some of the history hasn’t necessarily been positive. However, it sounds like things might actually be moving on the right track now. The final release of Perl 6 still expected on Christmas, as it has been for at least a couple years now. But, given Patrick’s report, it sounds like it might actually be a Christmas before my son starts elementary school. (I wasn’t always sure of that.)

Bug Labs

After the first talk, a company called Bug Labs gave a presentation. It was kind of an odd talk I thought since it really didn’t have much to do with Perl (existing APIs are Java), but it was more of a suggestion that Perl hackers could get involved. I’m a bad candidate for that. The product itself looked like an interesting diversion, but nothing I’d be willing to sink that much cash into. I’m not so much a hardware guy anyway.

My personal feelings aside, I have some doubts about the business plan of Bug Labs. It’s nice that they support Open Source, but the viability of the business model is a little questionable to me. The presenter kept saying they wanted to make it so easy that “your mom” could come up with a custom device. First, my mom is not likely to care about a device unless it comes prefab with as few buttons as possible. Second, my mom is not going to put down that kind of cash just so she can create some sort of customized web-cam/motion-sensor/GPS something-or-other. She has better things to do. I suspect she didn’t mean my mom literally, but that doesn’t mean my statements are any less valid for the hypothetically average mom either.

SQLite Extensions

After that was a talk on extending SQLite, which I admit I paid very little attention to because I was still trying to finish my slides for my first talk on Sunday. I thought this sounded interesting and it would be nifty to have more of that in some of the code we do at work, but since we don’t use SQLite for the work I’m thinking of, the talk doesn’t really apply to that.

Data::Rx

Ricardo Signes then gave a talk on something I’d never heard of before, Rx, but I think I’m going to check out. He’s basically put together a data validation system similar to XSD or RELAX-NG, but for general data structures in memory. It’s a really cool idea and I want to see what I might be able to gain from it, so it’s on my short list of things to try out in the near future. The fact that he’s got implementations for it in Ruby, Python, and PHP is also very interesting for interoperability.

Lunch

Next was lunch where I met Dan Klein, a fellow consultant for Grant Street, in person for the first time and had a pretty mediocre chicken marsala, but an excellent salad with fetta cheese, roasted almonds, and strawberries with a raspberry vinaigrette.

Advanced Pattern Matching

Paul Grassie, another co-consultant, gave a talk on regexes, which I again confess I mostly missed to work on my own talk. What material I did catch was a good review and there were bits that were somewhat new, but I wasn’t paying close enough attention to really learn them.

By the way, Paul and Dan work for Tom Christiansen Perl Consultancy. Given what I know of them now (having seen Paul in action and spent part of a day with Dan), I’d recommend their services if you have some need of Perl training for your company.

Network Introspection

This talk I almost completely ignored. There were some things in it that were interesting, but it was mostly for the sysadmins. I was familiar with and impressed with some of what was presented, but I did the system administrator thing already and have turned a new leaf. I’m not going back to the land of putting out fires in the world of hardware.

RDBMS

The next talk was on a database tool called Kioku::DB, which is an interesting idea and something I’m glad to be aware, but not something that will change the way I do my work or hobbies. Again, I’m still working on slides as I glance up now and then and this didn’t really capture my attention.

Email Hates the Living!

Finally, Ricardo gave his second talk of the day on Email. Having myself engaged in mortal combat against the spam monster at one of my first tech jobs and having been a systems administrator, this talk was flipping hilarious. His analysis on the insanity of email and the email specs is right on. For example, “asdf@!#$&” is a valid email address within the To: or From: line of your email, even though such an email couldn’t possibly be delivered. Yet, “asdf@!#$&.” is not. Stupid. It’s a great talk and helps to explain why his CPAN repository is filled with email code, when it doesn’t seem like it should really be quite that hard.

Dinner and Sleep

After that, the Grant Streeters still around headed out for dinner where there was some lively discussion of work and politics. Then, I went back to the hotel room and came up with a Lightning talk, did the final clean up on my slides, and then tried to get more sleep.

The Saga of the Missing Bag

I haven’t finished the story about my bag. Early Saturday, I called Midwest Airlines to find out about my bag. As I mentioned, mine was to be the only checked bag and the handler that I talked to couldn’t find it. He made me out a claim for the bag and said it would be delivered as soon as he could get it to me.

When I called Midwest, the conversation with the woman went something like this:

Me: Hi, I’m calling to find out about my missing bag.
Woman: What’s your name?
Me: Andrew Hanenkamp. H-A-N-E-N-K-A-M-P.
Woman: Mr. Hanenkamp? Yes, your bag came in on your flight. Why didn’t you pick it up?
Me: Um, because the guy who said he was going to pull it out of the plane said he didn’t find it and gave me a baggage claim ticket.
Woman: Okay, I’m very busy right now, I will try to get them delivered to you hotel. Can I get your number?

I gave her the number and then finally was able to get back with her during lunch. This conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi, I’m returning a call made to my cell phone?
Woman: Who is this? Is this Mr. Hanenkamp?
Me: Yes, I believe you have my bags, have they been sent to my hotel yet?
Woman: Well, your bag was here last night. My supervisor wants to know why didn’t you pick it up last night. It was here already.
Me: I know. As I told you before, the guy who pulled it out of the plane told me it didn’t come.
Woman: Hmm. Okay. Umm. Did he give you a baggage claim ticket?
Me: Yes. I have it in my wallet. (Thinking, do you want me to shove it through the phone?)
Woman: Okay, well, I guess I can have the delivery service take your bag over. Which hotel are you at? Do you know the zip code?
Me: [chuckle] Um, no, I don’t generally memorize the zip codes of the hotels I’m staying at.

Anyway, so when I got back, I had my bag and was finally able to change into completely fresh clothing and brush my teeth and such. Ah.

Sunday

I walked over to Wean Hall again after picking up my coffee and started out in the Rakudo Perl talk.

Rakudo Perl

This talk was also given by Patrick Michaud and I went to it rather than the Moose talk because I’m already somewhat familiar with Moose and because Perl 6 and Parrot are something I’d like to volunteer my time on. Perhaps I will at some point, but I have too many other things I’m doing that I’m more immediately interested in. I don’t have any excuse for not joining for reasons due to not knowing how now, though. Patrick went over all the sorts of things someone wanting to contribute might want to do to get started.

Managing Open Source Projects

Next I went to this talk by Tom Lane rather than attending Schwern’s talk on the y2038 bug. The talk was moderately interesting since Tom Lane is a Red Hat employee who spends most of his time contributing to PostgreSQL. It was interesting to here the differences between how Perl is managed and PostgreSQL, but I confess, I was again distracted, but this time by a bug report on one of my CPAN modules.

Data Structures

This was another talk by Paul Grassie and at a very introductory level. I don’t think he covered anything I don’t use on a nearly daily basis, but I was still working on bugs on my CPAN module. I did note that Paul has a very soothing voice and since I’ve only had about 8 hours of sleep total in the past 48 hours, it was making me a bit sleepy.

MooseX::Tour

Next was Jonathon Rockway’s talk on MooseX extensions. There are some pretty cool extensions to Moose available for dealing with various customizations to your meta-programming code. I’d recommend looking over his slides when they are posted on his blog. There’s some interesting things in there.

Lunch

We had more lunch. I got to meet Tom Welsch’s kids, since Tom brought them with him as he did a little light recruiting for Grant Street. I had more yummy salad and a decent sandwich (at least for having been catered).

Jifty Talk

I gave and got through my whole talk on Jifty. I’ve posted the slides, which is enough summary.

Prophet

I watched part of Kevin Falcone’s talk on Prophet and this is another one of those things that I have got to get my hands on in the near future. Qublog, in particular, could benefit from what it does very nicely.

Perl REST

Again, I gave this talk and the slides are posted.

Method Signatures

Lastly, I attended the talk Schwern gave on his new method signatures class. It’s pretty nice overall, but I’m a little hesitant to actually use it. His point about there being 240,000 extra lines of code that can be taken off of CPAN because of it is well-taken, but I’m not quite convinced to actually use it yet. On the other hand, the parser module that Matt Trout wrote, Devel::Declare, which has some interesting possible implications for the DSL work I want to do with Jifty.

Lightning Talks

Most of the lightning talks were great, mine excluded. I fail.

Ricardo gave a talk on Dist::Zilla, which I am also adding to my short list. It’s kind of a replacement for Makefile.PL and Module::Starter and Module::Release and such, but does some very smart things. If I find out that it’s extensible and mostly makes sense when I take a first hand look, I’ll likely be using this to manage my modules in the future.

Kelli Ireland gave a talk on the orange shirt that’s been traveling with various members of the Perl community to exotic destinations and offered it to anyone going somewhere interesting if they will take pictures.

There was a talk on going Sixty to Zero in Perl (a play on the Zero to Sixty tutorial given). This talk was great in that it showed how very readable Perl can be turned very unreadable if someone wishes to do so deliberately in order to maintain job security. It was a very good example of why serious Perl developers don’t understand why Perl gets kicked in the face so much when it is not difficult to write good Perl code if you actually try to do so.

Probably the most memorable lightning talk, though, was the LOLCAT history of Perl. Unfortunately, there’s no way such a talk can be translated into this summary in any useful fashion, so I will just say, that it was awesome.

After that, I skipped out because I’m sleepy and should have been asleep already, but decided to write this instead… Okay, so I think that does it for PPW 2008. This is Sterling Hanenkamp signing off. Good night and God bless.