dmo.ca/ blog/ YAPC::NA 2008, Day One

This year's Yet Another Perl Conference has come and gone, and I didn't bother to write anything during the conference. So, to make up for that, here's what I meant to post but didn't get around to.

Day Zero

The conference officially began on Monday, but I arrived Sunday afternoon, flying from Ottawa to O'Hare. The flight was delayed, but I passed the time catching up with Clayton, who was also heading down to YAPC.

In Chicago, I took the El to IIT, where this year's conference was located. I was staying in the dorms as I've done in previous years, but unfortunately the dorm quality was quite bad this time. Communal washrooms on another floor are a pain.

Day zero ended with the traditional, yet still entirely unofficial YAPC Welcome Dinner, which is organized outside the basic conference for people who arrive the day before. This time around, it was held at Goose Island Wrigleyville. Excellent food and beer -- I highly recommend it if you're in Chicago.

Day One

The actual conference begins with some fairly standard "welcome to the conference" presentations by the organizers, and a quite interesting opening keynote on the crazy new features of Perl 6 in the areas of parsers and regular expressions. Perl 6 by Christmas!

The regular talks began in the afternoon. I attended:

Following this, a group of us headed out to Giordano's for some Chicago-style pizza.

More to come in my [day two]{yapc-na-2008-day-two} post.