Despite being the worst attended YAPC in recent memory, 2024's show in Vegas had some of the best talks in a long while. In no particular order, the ones I remember after a week are:

• Damian's talk - Implements most of what you want out of a type system in perl, one of the points in my testing talk
• Demetrios's talk - Savings from this alone will save me more than the conference cost me
• Gavin Hayes' WASM talk - has big implications in general, and I will try this in playwright-perl soon
• Gavin's APPerl talk - I can see a use for this with clients immediately
• Exodist's Yearly roundup of what's new in test2 - The PSGI app he's built into it implements a lot of my testing talk's wish list
• Cromedome's Build a better readme - Good practical marketing advice

I would have loved to have seen the velociperl fellow show up, but I can't say I'm shocked given how attempts circumvent P5P paralysis in such a manner have ended up for the initiators thus far.

This year we had another Science track in addition to the perl and raku tracks which I submitted my testing talk to. In no particular order, the ones I enjoyed were:

• Adam Russell's paper - Using LLMs to make building semantic maps no longer pulling teeth? sign me up!
• Andrew O'Neil's paper - Like with 3D printing, these handheld spectrographs are going to change the world.

The track generated a fair bit of controversy due to a combination of Will and Brett being habitual irritants of Perl's In-Group, miscommunication and associated promotional efforts. While I regard their efforts as being in good faith, I doubt the TPRF board sees it that way, given they issued something of a condemnation during the final day's lightning talks. Every year somebody ends up being the hate object; victims need to be sacrificed to hutzilopotchli to keep the sun rising on the next conference.

That being said, the next conference is very much in doubt. Due mostly to corporate sponsorship of employee attendance largely drying up, the foundation took a bath on this one. I'm sure that the waves of mutual excommunications and factionalism in the perl "community" at large hasn't helped, but most of those who put on such airs wouldn't deign to have attended in the first place. My only productive thought would be to see what it is the Japanese perl conference is doing, and ape our betters. Lots of attendance, and they're even doing a second one this year. Must be doing something right.

My Talks

I got positive feedback on both of my talks. I suspect the one with the most impact will be the playwright one, as it has immediate practical impact for most in attendance. That said, I had the most productive discussions coming out of the testing talk. In particular the bit at the start where I went over the case for testing in general exposed a lot of new concepts to people. One of the retirees in the audience who raised the point that the future was "Dilbert instead of Deming" was right on the money. Most managers have never even heard of Deming or Juran, much less implemented their ideas.

Nevertheless, I suspect it was too "political" for some to call out fraud where I see it. I would point out that my particular example used (Boeing) is being prosecuted for fraud as of this writing. Nevertheless, everyone expects they'll get a slap on the wrist. While "the ideal amount of fraud in a system is nonzero" as patio11 puts it, the systematic distribution of it and near complete lack of punishment is (as mentioned in the talk) quite corrosive to public order. It has similar effects in the firm.

My lack of tolerance for short-sighted defrauding of customers and shareholders has got me fired on 3 occasions in my life, and I've fired clients over it. I no longer fear any retaliation for this, and as such was able to go into depth on why to choose quality instead. Besides, a reputation for uncompromising honesty has it's own benefits. Sometimes people want to be seen as cleaning up their act, after all.

I enjoyed very much working with LaTeX again to write the paper. I think I'll end up writing a book on testing at some point.

I should be able to get a couple of good talks ready for next year, supposing it happens. I might make it to the LPW, and definitely plan on attending the Japanese conference next year.