YAPC::Europe - Day 1 (23 July 2003)

09:30
First talk of the day is the very enlightening 'When Perl is not quite fast enough' by Nick Clark. Getting lots of ideas already...

10:45
Quick break for coffee & phone calls, now for the rest of the talk.

13:00
Nick's talk has finished. He took the approach of looking in isolation at a wide range of optimisations that can be made to Perl code rather than deconstructing a complete application. I preferred this style as it really made the talk more relevant - I'm sure that mose people will have found at least a couple of techniques that they could use, which may not have happened if the talk had concentrated on a specific program. This was a very useful talk (I ended up taking about 3 pages of notes), I hope the rest of YAPC::E will be as good.

14:30
Mark Jason Dominus - Tricks of the Wizards
This tutorial gave an insight into some of Perl's more unusual features, including Globs, AUTOLOAD, and source filtering. I'd never seen MJD talk before, but other people had told me his talks were very impressive and I wasn't dissapointed. He held the audience's attention throughout (his talk was just over 2 hours long) and was most effictive in dealing with questions and heckles without losing track or interrupting the flow of the presentation.

16:45
After a short snooze, MJD gave his second talk, entitled '12 Views'. This was a series of 12 lightening talks covering topics as varied as making quilts (?!), and communicating with aliens. Very entertaining!

20:30
Well it had to be done. After that famous scene in Pulp Fiction, we went to McDonalds for a Royal with Cheese - and a beer :-)