Please enjoy The True Story of Plerd: or, Why I Wrote a Blogging System in Twenty Fifteen, a talk I delivered at YAPC::NA 2015 in Salt Lake City. This video is about 21 minutes long.

This talk in some ways serves as the spiritual sequel to Just Make Your Thing, a five-minute talk I delivered at YAPC::NA in Austin two years ago. Much like that talk, The True Story of Plerd focuses on the problem of shipping creative work despite various internal obstacles — and doesn’t really contain many references to programming in general, much less Perl specifically. I thank the YAPC organizers for their ongoing efforts to include talk topics of broad interest to the technically apt, beyond literal programming.

A couple of errata:

• I seem to have gotten Ling Wang’s name the wrong way around, using the order found in his domain name rather than on his website. Oops…

• I didn’t realize until watching my own performance how my reference to starting fresh with last year’s IFComp codebase came across as rudely dismissive of my predecessors’ hard work at writing and maintaining the comp’s pre-2014 web presence. This was not my intent.

  I failed to resist the temptation to make an obligatory dig against PHP at a Perl conference, and ended up backhandedly insulting the efforts of friends who built something that worked for well over a decade. I apologize for this unintentional dickishness, and hope that it serves as a lesson in how going negative for the sake of a cheap laugh can cost more than it’s worth.