A Twelve Pack of YAPC

I just got back from Chicago. I really love that place. I usually tell people, "Chicago is a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there", but I had a great visit.

I went salmon fishing on Lake Michigan with my dad and my brother. We caught 6 fish and drank a few beers, then we met up with mom for a nice family dinner.

I also got to see my old friends Dave, Brooke, Margy and Emily. They really took good care of me. Thanks!

The main reason I went to Chicago was to speak at my 12th YAPC conference. That's me in that picture at the end of my first ever naked impromptu lightning talk!

I've been to 6 North America YAPCs (2001,2002,2003,2005,2006,2008); 5 in Asia (2004-2008) and YAPC Europe in Amsterdam (2001). I've given talks at every one of them.

This year's YAPC was really inspiring to me. Larry Wall's talk was the best one I've ever seen him give. I think it rekindled my spirit to work on the following major (for various definitions of major) open source projects:

• YAML
• C'Dent
• Perl 6
• Jemplate
  
• Kwiki
• Moose
  

as well as my many Perl modules like Inline, IO::All, pQuery, Module::Install, Module::Compile, JS, WikiText and Vroom.

The best part of YAPC is always seeing your old Perl friends and making new ones. Too many people to list here. I love y'all, and y'all know who you are.