Update: The full conference schedule is now online.

Pleased to announce that I shall present a talk this June at YAPC::NA, North America’s largest conference dedicated to the Perl programming language. I’ll speak about blog platforms, creative work, and selectively ignoring wheel-reinvention canards. I’ve yet to actually write the thing, so I honestly can’t say more than that at this time — but I have an idea of its shape, and I very much look forward to sharing it.

YAPC streams and records all its talks, so if you have no plans to drop by Salt Lake City this summer, you’ll still be able to watch both my talk and all the ones around it. Now that I think of it, since I missed last year’s conference, and haven’t watched any of the videos past Charlie Stross’s brilliant, forward-looking 2014 keynote, I ought to set some catch-up time aside for this spring. I learned about Gerda Shank’s wonderful and life-simplifying HTML::FormHandler by watching her presentation at YAPC 2012 some months after the fact, and I daily practice what Denise Paolucci’s 2013 lessons on RSI prevention taught me — just to name two examples of wonderful and free YAPC-based education.

This will be my second YAPC, after 2013’s Austin conference. While present bodily, I still only half-attended that one, since it took place within the weeks-long nadir of the crisis involving my parents that year. I frequently had to leave talks to take increasingly frustrated phone calls from the Bangor, Maine retirement home my mother had moved into just a couple of weeks earlier. I would end up skipping a lot of the conference in order to remotely arrange her move into an assisted-living facility elsewhere in Bangor. (Everything would end up OK, as described midway through this post, but it would take a few more months to get there.) Amidst all that, I still managed to present a lightning talk I’m still proud of, and meet several excellent Perl-community folks, albeit briefly. I hope to devote far more attention to them and others this June; if you find yourself there as well, do say hi!