Things I learned at the European Perl Conference 2017 in Amsterdam

I'm currently riding an ICE along some canal through the rainy Netherlands. What a perfect opportunity to write my summary of the European Perl Conference 2017 in Amsterdam.

My talks

  • As I was somehow shanghaied into being president of the YAPC Europe Foundation, I announced the location of next year's European Perl Conference, which I'm sure everybody knows by now to be Glasgow. I also tried to establish "Tepsy" as the European pronunciation of "Tipsy" (which was how the Americans called their Perl Conference (TPC -> tipsy; TEPC -> tepsy)).
  • Exceptional Model Middleware about Exception Handling, Fat Models and PSGI Middlewares.
  • The Power of Raw SQL, showing Common Table Expressions (CTEs), Window Functions and Update/Insert from Select.
  • I also did lightning talk on DBIx::SchemaChecksum, our tool to manage database schematas.

Here's the list of things I learned

This year my notes are very spotty. I spend quite some time in the hallway track, chatting with people.

  • Spending the day before the conference on a train is a good way to arrive at the conference with all slides finished. Especially if there is wifi on the train.
  • Deutsche Bahn seems to prefer Dutch to Austrians. At least they only turned on the wifi after we crossed the border from Austria to Germany, but kept it running when entering the Netherlands.
  • Tourists are the worst. It's one thing to have to deal with tourist crowds in your home town, but missing a tram because some tourists did not manage to buy their tickets made me pity the native Amsterdam people who have to deal not only with regular tourists, but with stoned & drunk tourists.
  • Bring an umbrella or rain gear if the weather forecast for your destinations mentions rain, even though it is HOT SUMMER at home.
  • Bring a belt if you plan to load your cargo pants with cargo.
  • There are dodecahedron Rubik "cubes" (Damian)
  • It's easy to write a 1196 lines regex to parse Perl, but it's hard to write a correct one, especially if it contains a gravitational vortex.
  • Regexp::Optimizer optimizes regex, using Regexp::Assemble
  • This looks nice: for my \ @list (@list_of_list ) { ... }
  • Don't code yourself out of your job - stealth automate! (brian)
  • The ultimate O()-notation: O(argh!) (Matt)
  • perlbrew is overkill on servers where you only want to run one app. Check out Perl::Build (Matt)
  • Dist::Surveyor examines all the modules installed within the specified perl library directory and uses the metacpan API to work out what versions of what distributions could have provided those modules. (Matt)
  • The conference is not beginner friendly enough (said some newcomers / beginners). I'll publish another post on this topic very soon.
  • Kenichi Ishigaki (charsbar) is working on a rewrite of the PAUSE in Mojolicous. His repo contains the folder lib/pause_1999. (Kenichi)
  • Devel::KYTProf is a perl code profiler to explore IO blocking time. (Kenichi)
  • To checkout the whole of CPAN via git you need 16GB diskspace. And a lot of inodes! (Todd)
  • There is a COMBINING DOT ABOVE RIGHT: ◌̇ (Kang-min Liu)
  • And there is also a COMBINING DOT ABOVE LEFT in Unicode 10, so we can have some composing umlauts that will probably mess up a lot of systems.
  • I missed to await the future, because the room was blocked on People-IO (more I than O) (LeoNerd)
  • In Perl 6, you can make a named parameter mandatory by screaming at it (Damian)
  • Math is so much fun! (Damian)
  • Damian is not only a tough arm wrestling opponent: Tux tried to brain-wrestle Damian, but failed; this added ~600 lines to a certain regex.
  • Secret Hitler is even more fun when the group your playing with consists of a bunch of Germans and one Austrian.
  • You make everyone's life (specially your own!) better if you're a nice person, and not an asshole. (well, I already knew that, but it's worth repeating) (Ruth)
  • Docker has solutions for a lot of problems, but those are not the solutions you are looking for (hallway track)
  • Servers used to be pets: you cared about them & gave them names. Then they became like cattle: you have a big herd consisting of some semi-anonymous numbers. (Claudio)
  • Currently we're in the process of transforming applications from pets to cattle, which makes servers more like a field you rent from your overlord, Earl AWS and Duke Google.
  • Somebody once sold a lot of 200kg cans of strawberry puree (or printed some fake stickers and put them on some old oil barrels)
  • when in doubt, apologize (Book)
  • Being nice doesn't make you weak, being nasty doesn't make you strong (Book)
  • Ice mining will be a major industry (Ovid)

As usual, thanks to the orgas, the speakers, the attendees, and of course the sponsors!

See you all next year in Glasgow!