Schmonzcast #17: I'm proud to have been a speaker at this year's Pittsburgh Perl Workshop, a two-day conference for fellow practical-minded Perl programmers. As one who has striven to code in a modern way — TDD, expressive objects, type-checking, and the like — in a non-modern environment, I'm sensitive to Perl being pigeonholed. So it was gratifying to see talks about familiar and timeless ideas (systems programming, asynchrony, inversion of control, simplicity, automated testing) as well as envelope-pushing new ones (everything Ingy said, native-extension performance, high-performance serialization). I also appreciated getting to meet the author of Higher-Order Perl and help him set up an ikiwiki to play with.
My talk was half explication, half topical demonstration: on Saturday morning we learned about Ingy's new Swim format, and here I was on Sunday morning attempting to live-code ikiwiki support for Swim input. Would I get it working? Would I be able to give a demo? Would I eventually come to understand mjd's suggestion that I sing as I code? Here's the full screencast of my presentation (or watch on YouTube).