Hyperbole

Still catching up...

My primary reason for going to Portland this year was to attend OSCON 2006. This was my fourth OSCON (I went to 1999, 2000, and 2005 previously), and as always an excellent conference. Bringing my family along this year made it considerably less stressful than last year – last year I was always worrying about what was going on at home, having left my Casey West, and he told me that not only did he bring his three kids, but he brought babysitting (in the person of his sister-in-law!) He stressed that the 1:1 child/adult ratio was key to success; perhaps when el tercero/la tercera comes along we'll have to find someone to drag to conferences with us...

I met a lot of folks at this conference (I'll spare the names to avoid gratuitous "name-dropping"), some in the "hallway track" and others simply from going to the "right parties". Saw a lot of cool tech, which I might rehash in some later blog entries. OSCON is always such a great conference, and I hope to keep attending every year (given adequate sponsorship.)

Another note: I observed in an earlier use.perl journal entry that Perl 6 development seemed to have stalled out, as far as I could tell. It seems that the problem was that the wrong folks were doing the wrong jobs – since the reshuffling around the time of YAPC::NA things seem to have much more momentum. It's hard to know the future fate of Perl 6, but I'm much more optimistic now about it than before, and expect I will start using some of the Perl 6 stack that is already implemented in Perl 5 soon.