Kevin's Weblog

After reading various posts and comments from some of the presenters, I’m feeling some pre-conference jitters of my own.

In particular, I’m a little distressed by an attitude that seems to be moderately common among those speaking, which is something along the lines of “I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t speaking; None of the sessions are anything new or interesting to me”. There are a few possible explanations I can see.

First, the people in question could just be close-minded. I certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’ve run into people who can’t find anything interesting outside of the narrow band of work they do.

Second, maybe the talks really are mostly just rehashes of stuff you can find in the manuals or FAQs. This would be a little sad, and would reflect badly on either the conference organizers or the speakers themselves (for not putting in the effort to talk about anything that isn’t already well documented).

Third, maybe there really just isn’t anything new and interesting to talk about, at least in certain areas. I’ve heard some people make the claim that Perl is getting stagnant and boring. I’m not sure that I really buy that, though. More mature, yes, but that opens up a whole new area of interesting work to do. (I’m hoping that the POE talk, for example, fits into this category.)

Possibly, I’m just overreacting to passing comments. I’m still trying to keep an open mind at this point, although, I’m also taking a little advice from Dr. Bacchus to think about exactly what I want to get out of the convention. I don’t think I’ll go into precisely what that is just yet, though.