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

Here's my Day Three summary for YAPC::NA 2008. Day two consisted of talks throughout the morning, with lightning talks and the closing keynote in the afternoon.

If you haven't read the [day one]{yapc-na-2008-day-one} and [day two]{yapc-na-2008-day-one} summaries, start there first

Today, I attended:

Another uneventful lunch occurred. Campus food tends to grow on you after a while.

After lunch came the lightning talks. A full list, and some abstracts can be found here. Here are notes from some of the notable ones:

There were also quite a few funny talks that I won't bother describing here, except to say that they probably only make sense to Perl people, and were probably only funny in context. I played the "FSB" video for some friends in Ottawa, and they didn't get it.

Following the lightning talks was a brief closing address from the 2008 organizers, and an announcement of the 2009 YAPC::NA location -- Pittsburgh.

Then came the keynote by Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick. The talk was mostly about respecting and trusting your users. Not much Perl content, and another attendee pointed out to me afterwards that it was actually a recycled talk that had been presented at two other conferences. I suspect it was only given because Google was a major sponsor, and so was allowed to pick the keynote speaker -- both presenters work on Google Code. I wasn't terribly impressed... I hope that next YAPC, the closing keynote has a bit more effort put into it.

Following this was a Perl Foundation closing address, and a town hall meeting, which I skipped out on early so that I could call my wife before running off to dinner with an old friend from university.

And that was YAPC::NA 2008. I highly recommend this conference if you have anything at all to do with Perl. If there's anything you'd like to see at YAPC::NA 2009, I've been told that the organizers are taking requests this year, and in addition to the traditional call for speakers, they plan to try and find speakers on topics that are heavily requested by the community.