Wednesday, July 06, 2005

A little bit about the third day.
"Where did my memory go?" by Dan Sugalski -- basically emphasized Devel::Size and Devel::LeakTrace.
"Lazy test development" by Joe McMahon -- introduced Devel::TestEmbed and Devel::Command. Embedding Test::More in the perl debugger so you can use the familiar ok/is right in the debugging session and have the commands saved for later testing. Too bad Devel::TestEmbed didn't pass the make test for me.
The really interesting talks were by Brian Ingerson. He has a nice laid back approach to presenting which just needs to be seen. So, he had two talks, one after the other.
"Building Data Driven Test Frameworks (and actually enjoying it!)" -- ingy introduces Test::Base, which really blows the socks off Test::More because, well, just check out the SYNOPSIS for Test::Base.
"Perldoc - New Tools for Perl Documentation" -- ingy does it again, this time rethinking POD (plain old documentation). What's really nice is that you can write your perl documentation as comments. Perldoc.pm (not quite on cpan yet) parses the comments and generates POD. IMHO, this module is definitely worth using once it comes out.
And finally, the last official talks: the Lightning talks. I think there were 16 presenters with 5 minutes each. There was also a lot of comic relief, which was met very well by the audience. The juggler dude was amazing. All in all, the conference was more than worth the $80 USD. It was, like Richard Dice (the head organizer) said, a "BIG PARTY" for perl hackers/lovers/etc.