OK, so let me get the obligatory meme out of the way first: “In Soviet Russia, the YAPC enjoys you!” Well, I hope that my talks were enjoyed anyway. :-)
Despite having been at every Perl Mova event in Ukraine and even having made it to the Vladivostok Perl Workshop, this was the first time I managed to make it to YAPC::Russia. That said, I have been in Moscow before, and it was nice to be back again. It’s a vast city with an almost equally vast metro. The marble stations, with their epic decorations, never fail to impress me. For the first time, I was also impressed by my airport experience: I arrived in a shiny new terminal with efficient immigration (parallel processing for the win). The girl who inspected and stamped my passport almost looked like she was capable of smiling! :-) Getting the visa to go to Russia was the usual hassle, but an hour into my time there – surrounded by the Cyrillic script, grand buildings and the sounds of a Slavic language (my favorite language family) – it all felt worth it. :-)
The first day was a Perl 6 hackathon. Many people had never installed a Perl 6 implementation before, so masak and I helped people through that. Along the way, somebody’s spectest run found a platform-specific unicode related bug and with masak’s help they filed it. It was nice to see the hackathon quickly turning up results. Some people played with Perl 6 and modules; there was some work on Perl 6’s LWP module. We got to the bottom of why Zavolaj broke recently and I was able to write to the Parrot list about the issue. With a little guidance, a performance-boosting patch for NQP, which I’ve now also been able to use in the nom branch of Rakudo, was also developed at the hackathon. I also had chance to write a couple of patches myself.
Days two and three were “normal” conference days. After Andrew Shitov gave the opening, Carl and I took to the stage to talk about what had been done at the previous day’s hackathon. I decided to try and introduce myself in Russian. I’m normally not great at it, and was very nervous about speaking in front of a bunch of people in a language I’m not especially good at. Afterwards I was told that while my pronunciation was quite accented, I spoke pretty much correctly and it was easy to understand. Phew! :-) Some day, I hope to do a lightning talk in Russian…at this rate, it may be a few years yet though…
Later that day I had my first real talk, which was a re-run of “Inside a Compiler”, but with a few updates given that NQP has been tweaked a bit since I gave it in Taiwan (back then, I was still deep in the middle of a bunch of changes). My second talk was on the final day of the conference, and was essentially a Rakudo progress report, very much like the one I gave at the Netherlands Perl Workshop. The difference this time was that I’m actually actively working on a bunch of the optimizations and improvements that the talk discusses, whereas back at NLPW it was more forward-looking. Now I’ve given it in the future and present tense, I look forward to giving it in the past tense, once all of the things it describes are completed. :-) You can find the slides and code here. By the way, masak’s talk – on the value of compiler-ish techniques in everyday programming – was excellent; I’m sure he’ll post slide links in his blog soon.
After YAPC, masak and I headed off to Saint Petersburg for a few days of vacation with a little hacking here and there. Due to Saint Petersburg being full of many wonderful things to look at, along with the discovery of a “Beer Restaurant” (yes, that’s how it actually described itself…even better, it was called “Pivorama”), not a great deal of hacking got done. Well, I don’t get to be in Russia all that often, so I was all for enjoying seeing it. :-)
Anyway, time to get back to the Rakudo “nom” branch hacking. It’s going pretty well, though there’s nothing hugely exciting to report just yet; I’m still busily re-building a bunch of the primitives. It’s feeling good, both in terms of the immediate benefits we’ll have, but also in the number of things it will open up for the future.
6guts 