Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Orlando Perl Workshop (OPW) / Perl Oasis

I had a really great time this weekend with all the guys at OPW! Although I'm obviously not a Perl guy, it was neat to see some of Perl's capabilities and some of the cool things this community is doing to improve web development. Some of these ideas could even be applied to PHP development. I'll have to give that more thought.

I was also graciously invited to speak about roles in PHP (since they were inspired by Perl's Moose::Roles module). I'll throw up another post with more details about the talk later.

There were some great speakers; I really enjoyed the talks and getting to meet fellow programmers. Stevan Little gave a great talk on everything, particularly wiring up a new app with URL routing and Bread::Board. The colorful Matt Trout told an epic poem about database management, and Marty Pauley give an interesting talk on functional programming in Perl, which actually refreshed a lot of the basics I'd forgotten from school. Shawn Moore revealed even more geek than I thought possible in his talk about conquering NetHack with an artificially intelligent bot.

Of course, there were more good things that happened there, but these are the highlights that came to mind. Many thanks to Chris Prather and his very organized and hard-working wife Jamie for their putting this shindig together. Well done! I look forward to next year. Also, I wanted to mention a particular Perl web server named Plack.