May 23, 2003
Back from NLUUG
For people who had expected regular reports from the NLUUG Spring conference, I'm sorry for disappointing you. Most of my time at NLUUG was spent fetching jugs of water to drink my Dafalgan with, since I had been developing a sour throat before I left and suddenly my body decided that, after many years (my wife just said she has never known me ill before today, so that must be something like 13+ years), a sour throat can develop into a decent fever, a current inability to digest non-liquid food, and the feeling I drank way too many beers yesterday - which was not the case.Anyhow: I managed to give my Cocoon presentation, and it was really fun. The presentation before me was about web architecture design consideration, and was basically making fun of every web framework out there, since the presenter was very sure you can generate 90% of all websites statically, using templating, shell or Perl scripting, and using the filesystem as a database. Besides, it was a good speaker, with plenty of interaction and laughs. I was a bit worried to present Cocoon after his ban on XML and XSLT, but at the same time his obsession with serving static files (which is justified of course), gave me the possibility to start my talk with "I know you've all learned now that you should generate websites using wget, bash and perl, but I can tell you, if you want to build a website full of dynamism without writing unmaintainable code, go for Cocoon since it has 'wget' built-in". Of course, presenting for a Dutch audience means I can make some standard jokes about our Flemish dialect of Dutch (it's basically the same, except that we don't pronounce any vowels), and so the presentation went off pretty well. I even recognized Guido in my audience, so I spent some more time on the flow slides. And I went to talk with him after my presentation, about Python and continuations for implementing flow in Cocoon using Jython, and apparently the Jython implementation of Python's new yield statement might be something to look at.
In the evening, there was a dinner for all speakers, and I was lucky to sit at a nice table: one Dutch MySQL-guy with his Aussie wife, and a Dutch PHP QA team member, which also serves as the editor for PHP Magazine. Lots of entertaining conversations about Aussies, English for non-natives, LGPL and the 'PHP' situation with Apache. Very agreeable, even though at the end of the evening my mind started disconnecting due to a lack of Dafalgan. Quite unfamiliar for Dutch restaurants, the food was really, really good.