Things I learned at Twin City Perl Workshop 2008

Last weekend has seen the first Perl workshop held in two capital cities. Organising it was fun, though I have to admit that I slacked quite a lot and thus most of the work was done by Maros, Pepl (on the Viennese side) and Jozef, Emmanuel and Martin (the Bratislava team).

Things I learned:

  • A/B Testing sound like a very good idea.
  • I should take a look at NYTProf.
  • Check if your laptop works with the projector! Especially if you have a new laptop (like me) that never was connected to a projector before...
  • Check if your images are in the correct resolution. Some jokes of Maros' talk were killed by this ("Do you want to play thermonuclear war?")
  • Another interesting thing to take a look at: D-Bus
  • XML and XLST are still not dead (or as pepl said: "This is the first Perl conference where XLST is mentioned in more than two talks" (excluding his :-)
  • I should try to build a GUI for some of my scripts. But should I use GTK2 or Wx?
  • It's quite easy to find nasty bugs in Rakudo, but very hard to put them into a testcase that still fails...
  • Cat-herding people gets easier the more often you do it.
  • Buying 19 regular and 4 discount train tickets to Bratislava and handing them out to the right people (who all showed up on time) was easier than expected.
  • I probably won't get nearer to "Indiana Jones"-like stuff than during Tara's talk.
  • Do not recompile your kernel to get the projector to work (5 minutes before your talk..) (In fact I learned that years ago, but some people still like to mock me..)
  • There were more Perl hackers in Bratislava than expected. Which is great!

Things I still have to learn

  • Don't write your talk at the party before the conference.
  • Set up wpa-supplicant WLAN on my laptop.
  • How to host a proper auction.

So, to sum it up, Twin City Perl Workshop was a very nice event with great talks and interesting attendees. I'm very much looking forward to do something similar next year. To bad I couldn't make it to the hackathon at Jonathans place

You can find photos on flickr tagged as 'tcpw2008'. And we're currently trying to get links to all the presentations...

Original: http://use.perl.org/~domm/journal/37865

Legacy comments

Alias: I should try to build a GUI for some of my scripts (orignal post)

If you can, go with Wx.

The main advantage is that it is easily installable on all three main desktop operating systems as a dependency (unlike Gtk) and that Wx "looks like a real application" on all three main desktop applications.

gabor: Re: (orignal post)

If you mean Windows 2000, XP and Vista then maybe yes, thanks to Strawberry Perl but I see people struggle with Wx on both Linux and even more on Mac.

On the bright side it will be all smooth in a few months as the new releases of the various Linux distributions start to distribute Padre and the wx stack with it.

jozef: Re: (orignal post)

Debian Lenny (current testing) includes libwx-perl package. On the other hand the libgtk-perl is already in Debian Etch (current stable).

Aristotle: XML/XSLT (orignal post)

Well, I for one hope they never die! They’re far too useful. Just because XML has been used by the clueless as a hammer for every problem they encounter does not make it a bad idea when used correctly; and the XSLT model (albeit not syntax) is elegant to an extent I have rarely encountered elsewhere.

My main weblog is produced by XSLT processing a single XML file, and despite the tons of small features I have added to the transforms over the years, I still find them completely straightforward and easy