This year's Yet Another Perl Conference has come and gone, and I didn't bother to write anything during the conference. So, to make up for that, here's what I meant to post but didn't get around to.

Day Zero

The conference officially began on Monday, but I arrived Sunday afternoon, flying from Ottawa to O'Hare. The flight was delayed, but I passed the time catching up with Clayton, who was also heading down to YAPC.

In Chicago, I took the El to IIT, where this year's conference was located. I was staying in the dorms as I've done in previous years, but unfortunately the dorm quality was quite bad this time. Communal washrooms on another floor are a pain.

Day zero ended with the traditional, yet still entirely unofficial YAPC Welcome Dinner, which is organized outside the basic conference for people who arrive the day before. This time around, it was held at Goose Island Wrigleyville. Excellent food and beer -- I highly recommend it if you're in Chicago.

Day One

The actual conference begins with some fairly standard "welcome to the conference" presentations by the organizers, and a quite interesting opening keynote on the crazy new features of Perl 6 in the areas of parsers and regular expressions. Perl 6 by Christmas!

The regular talks began in the afternoon. I attended:

• Skimmable Code (abstract slides

  This one covered a number of tips to writing code that can be easily and quickly understood. It's mostly stuff that I already knew, though.

• Handling the Ball of Mud (abstract )

  How to deal with giant, organically-grown projects with little or no design. I don't agree entirely with what he said (h2xs for module initialization?! You should use Module::Starter instead.) but all in all a pretty good talk that helps pass on some of the lessons of code maintenance and refactoring, as well as covering many of the nontechnical issues with trying to make changes to a large, poorly designed application.

  But again, mostly stuff I already knew from refactoring CanIt 2.x -> 3.x

• Email Hates The Living (abstract )

  The funniest talk of the conference. Basically a rant on email standards and the impossibility of correctly implementing them, interspersed with zombie humour. RJBS did a great job on this one. I found myself alternately laughing like maniac and saying "Ohmygod, I remember dealing with that one and it's just as bad as he says."

• Understanding Malware ( abstract )

  A general talk on "reclaiming your inbox" from malware. Not terribly informative to someone who deals with this stuff all day, but he did have some interesting numbers from MessageLabs' own monitoring -- like 10% of all email traffic on some domains being Facebook-generated notification mails. He also briefly mentioned some time-based analysis of 419 scam messages to determine how the scammers are modifying their message content over time, but didn't go into depth.

  He also claimed that we have "won the war" against spam, because according to their numbers, most spam nowadays is not intended to advertise legitimate goods, but to scam the recipient. I don't quite agree that the "war" has been won, but I do agree that there are few legitimate businesses who see unsolicited email advertising as an acceptable way to promote themselves. This is good, but it's a long way from winning the spam war.

Following this, a group of us headed out to Giordano's for some Chicago-style pizza.

More to come in my [day two]{yapc-na-2008-day-two} post.