Airline tickets and hotel reservations were made through priceline.com, which I'd strongly recommend to anyone who doesn't mind flying out at weird times. (Tickets from Tulsa, OK with 4 days advance notice was bid and accepted at $200 and the hotel was only $50/night.)

Held at Carnegie Mellon University (in Pittsburgh, PA), yapc promised to be an inexpensive, yet full Perl conference. And it succeeded, with over 400 people in attendance. Registration was only $75 and dorm rentals were available at low cost. Registration included 3 days of conferences and a few meals.

One of the many impressive things to me was the book of talks given to every attendee. Just shy of a full a ream of paper, this book contained the slides to most of the talks that were being given during this 3 day conference fest. This made it so easy to take relevant notes in the margin.

Excellent talk! Mark lectured us on the joys of globs (did you know that globs were orange? :), playing with AUTOLOAD, tie and state machines.

He began the talk by discussing the "Principles of Magic", which is based on knowing the Perl Symbol table. From there, understanding globs was a cinch. The rest of the talk built up on these simple pinciples. Every few minutes presented some new and interesting concepts. And even when the concepts weren't new, some of the uses were.

JAPHs by Abigail

A fascinating and mind-boggling talk. JAPHs are simply obfuscated code that print out "Just another Perl Hacker". Not really useful, but fun and it stretches your Perl know-how and creativity to the limit.

Abigail made everyone figet and groan as he presented his last JAPH example, which used a computed goto, eval, POD, a loop with only unconditional jumps which terminates anyway; self modifying code, strict, -w (warnings turned on), isn't more than one line, and isn't more than 80 characters.

perl -Mstrict -we '$_ = "goto F.print chop;\n=rekcaH lreP rehtona tsuJ";F1:eval'

Yeah, you can easily see that "Just another Perl Hacker" is backwards, but how does it output? This one had us forgetting about lunch to analyze.

Ordered Hashes, by Jeff "japhy" Pinyan

Japhy, one of PerlGuru's moderators and article contributors, gave a talk about how to order hashes. Definitely a few places uses can be found for this.

Advanced Programming Techniques, by Mark-Jason Dominus

Another excellent talk by MJD. Though some of the material overlapped from Wednesday's "Tricks of the Wizards", he presented lots new new things, such as callbacks, caching, memoization, etc.

Quantum Superposition, by Damian Conway

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant talk by Damian! Side splitting comedy, new functions that made the entire audience drool. Just imagine:

Yes, Damian says we will be able to do this via his new module Quantum::Superpositions, which will be released into CPAN soon. This little snippet doesn't do his talk justice. The only time I'd ever seen a standing ovation for a seminar!

Have I mentioned already that this talk was brilliant?

Update - 8/11/2000 - Quantum::Superpositions is now available at CPAN.

Lightning Talks, hosted by Mark-Jason Dominus

Lightning talks were 16 short talks given by various people. There was standing room only in this 90 minute treat.

After all of this mindbending stuff, it was great just to sit down and relax the next day. A small group of us went out to eat on Saturday at a very good Mexican restaurant.

Later that evening, Uri had taken Damian and I out to dinner at an excellent restaurant with a stunning view of downtown Pittsburgh.

yapc is the conference to go to. Whether or not you're on a tight budget, this conference is worth every penny (and then some!). Thanks to all who organized, attended, and spoke at yapc!