yapc was, of course, excellent. I don't know how Damian Conway ever gets to sleep with all those smarts running around in his head. Rusty posted a story about the quantum stuff which gives better details about it. One of the interesting side-effects of hearing him talk is that whenever I read his Object Oriented Perl book or any of the voluminous documentation his modules provide, I'll have an Australian voice running around my head...
Another cool thing was meeting some folks who are doing somewhat similar object persistence stuff. Schwern's talk on Class::DBI was interesting, and I think I'm going to swipe a few ideas from it -- with proper attribution of course :) Having something akin to 'stored procedures in perl' is very nifty.
The discussion after the talk was also useful. I learned that nobody else seems to be tying security to object persistence, so maybe there's hope for me yet :)
Orwant's talk this year was somewhat cryptic, despite the fact that I felt smug when he mentioned Temple Grandin and I actually knew who she was. He seemed to be discussing all the difficulties regarding copyright in a roundabout way, which might be the only method you can discuss it with an auditorium full of open-source geeks.
Maybe it was me, but I detected an undercurrent of concern regarding the upper levels of perl and the divisiveness found on p5p. Questions like: where is this coming from? Is this inevitable when a community grows? I'm not sure these are answerable questions, but Larry seemed to accept some of the blame when he said in his talk that he'd been working on the new Camel book for the last six months and hadn't had time to play his shepherd role. He also said that people need to argue about what they're arguing about, not bringing all the baggage into every argument. (He also said this is a Good Thing for a marriage too, and being almost three-months married now, I agree.)
But that's just me on the outside looking in, so it's probably wrong.
(Originally posted elsewhere)