What I learned at Frozen Perl 2009

From AndrewMoore

The Frozen Perl 2009 workshop was held in February 2009 in Minneapolis. It's just a one day workshop instead of a multi-day conference like YAPC is, so this list of things I learned will be shorter than my list of what I learned at YAPC::NA 2008.

First, thanks a bunch to all of the people who were necessary to make the workshop a great success. There were folks like Leonard Miller and the other Minnesotans who worked really hard to plan and organize the workshop. Then, there were all of the speakers, like keynote speaker Andy Lester who provided fantastic instructional talks and demonstrations all day. Everyone worked together really hard and ended up putting on a great workshop. I'm already looking forward to next year.

Now, here are some of the things I learned throughout the day:

1. Parrot 1.0 is due out March 17, 2009. That means we should redouble our efforts to make rakudo more usable on this now more stable platform. Look for rakudo development to really pick up this year.
2. jrockway is an emacs nut. Actually, I already knew this. I was just reminded of it and my thoughts were strongly confirmed. I need to get that guy to teach me emacs. I've only been using it since 1995, so I don't really know much about it yet compared to him.
3. No. They will not put NASCAR on any of the TVs in the bar when there is any kind of hockey being played. Even re-runs.
4. Devel::REPL is a cool tool. I never really saw the usefulness in it until this meeting. I'm going to start using it for my on-offs and trial pieces of code.
5. I should learn more about object databases and play with KiokuDB. It's my new hammer looking for a nail.
6. Patrick Michaud is one of the few people who can pull off a live demo, and he can make it good even if it fails. I've seen him do this a few times. Sometimes his demo works, and sometimes it doesn't. Either way, he makes his point and the crowd goes wild.

Thanks again, to everyone who made Frozen Perl 2009 a great success.