Back from the Italian Perl Workshop

I'm back from Pisa, where I attended the Italian Perl Workshop 2008 last week (kindly invited by the organizers).

This was a very enjoyable conference. Several talks were in English, but most of them were in Italian: however, it was still easy for me to understand what was going on, partly because Italian is not really far from French, partly because of my already acquired familiarity with this language, and finally because good slides always help. (I'm sure I would have had a lot more trouble understanding presentations in Dutch or in Spanish, for example.)

I presented two talks; the first one, on Thursday, was a bit improvised: it was for the first part a plea in favour of writing code that stylistically will avoid clobbering the history in a version control system; for a second part, a live demonstration of a tool I wrote for consulting the history of a git repository from within vim. (More on that tool later.) My second talk, on Friday, was a presentation of the main new features in perl 5.10 -- basically an updated and translated version of the talk I gave at the French Perl Workshop 2007 in Lyon. The fact that I had a cold did not help my voice and my throat was aching after both presentations. I'm not sure I want to hear the audio recordings that were made.

We stayed the whole week-end in Pisa afterwards, visiting the city. Have I mentioned how much I enjoy Italy? Each time I go there I wish I could stay longer; and if I had to choose a country to live in besides France, that would certainly be Italy. (Moreover, they have the best food in the world. And the wines are not bad either.)

I come back with a to-do list that includes starting using Devel::NYTProf, which was presented by Tim Bunce; and looking at Matt Trout's Devel::Declare craziness. It seems that I have joined #moose on the perl IRC network, too. Those things just happen after conferences. And that's why you should go to conferences: they build the community much more than mailing lists and IRC channels. A great thanks to all conference organizers!

I didn't take many pictures of the IPW, but they're on flickr already. More sightseeing shots will follow.