Sadly the Dutch Perl Workshop or Nederlandse Perl Workshop is over. :(

Even though I was very tired to begin it all with the event was a lot of fun.

The workshop itself was just on friday, but on thursday evening we worked until 01:00 to get the network working. At the event location, Hotspot wireless was provided by the ‘StayOkay’, but this only allowed traffic over port 80 and 443, and was just crappy. So we connected a spare laptop to cisco switch + accespoints we could borrow and let that route all traffic over a OpenVPN link to a freshly setup Virtual Server. Worked like a charm.

On friday the day started early with the first talk at 9.15 (10 minutes late, as was planned :). With a few breaks for coffee/tea and lunch in the afternoon, we had one full track of talks ranging from 5 to 20 minutes. Topics where diverse aswell, from in-depth perl hacks to generic coding strategies and application showcases. A lot of fun, but quite intense.

At the end of the day we had an auction for the Perl Promotion foundation, which organises the event and a fun quiz featuring obscure Perl issues.

Dinner was included and tasty, and the rest of the evening was filled with discussions, playing fluxx and drinking whiskey or beer.

I’d say I can’t wait until next year, but since I’m quite exhausted from this one, I can now :)
I took some pictures with my Practica MTL3, as soon as the film is developed, I’ll post some here.

Beetje laat, maar aanstaande vrijdag de 6e Maart 2009. Is dus de Jaarlijkse Nederlandse Perl Workshop. Meestal boeiend, altijd gezellig. In middels is het programma ook redelijk vol en online te bezichtigen.

http://www.perlworkshop.nl/nlpw2009/schedule

Verder geef ik dit jaar zelf ook een praatje over m’n HealthMatrix, waarvan ik voor vrijdag nog hoop een release te doen. De huidige release is niet heel optimaal.

Mocht je vrijdag dus nog tijd hebben, schrijf je dan nog vooral in!

This weekend I’m hanging out on Fosdem which is quite fun, although mainly from a social point of view.

The ADA talks where intresting and I might take a look at the language. I felt they left out a lot during the talks. Which made me a bit confused as to how abstract the language really is. It looks powerful, but also very limiting.

Koen gave an small overview over a migration from Informix to PostgreSQL. This talk was again followed by a intresting talk on how to run ’software meetings’ in a somewhat centralised way. And currently watched a talk on ext4 which was fun and now watching a FreeBSD performance talk.

Overall I’ve mainly running into familiar faces and enjoying nioce belgian beers in de evening. The talks aren’t bad, but I do see it more as a social event. The network on the otherhand is quite crap, with ports being blocked, accespoints requiring users to press buttons on pages before you get any routing, and just entire parts not working.

On anoter note, the Dutch Perl Workshop is comming up soon. On the 6th of March this year you can spent an entire day following cool perl related talks, talking to fellow perl coders and playing Fluxx. A program isn’t online yet, but it’s bound to be fun anyway.

Ext4 talk at Fosdem 2009