I rode a Greyhound bus on my crusade of saving a few bucks. I always had issues with buses, when I was a child I used to go from Celaya to Mexico City (and back) almost every weekend for a couple of years and I developed a phobia against the whole bus experience. Even though, getting to Pittsburgh from New York City was cheaper riding a bus than the other alternatives anyway, flying or train. Anyways, it was an awful experience that prevented me from being complete recovered after each travel leg.

Staying at the CMU dorms was also a nice and pleasant experience, feeling for three days like I was a kid on a nice American college. I might want to do that some time in the future pursuing a Master's degree (some day).

At YAPC, I had the nice chance to get to know a lot of people I'd only known by mailing lists and CPAN modules authors that I use on a daily basis. I also had attended YAPC 08 last year in Chicago, so I already knew a small group of mongers.

I delivered my talk about Perl and social networks on Tuesday. I gave it an small twist by moving it into a more motivational, business perspective for hackers, in the last minute. I was overall satisfied with it, and I also think some things were not well done and had to be changed. Fortunately, quite some people came to me and gave good, positive, constructive feedback about it, that I was very thankful to receive, and unfortunately some people also threw destructive criticism that only makes you think how douche-baggy people in the community you can be. In any way, I was happy and satisfied, some observations:

• I have to take out a lot of personal stuff I poured into it because people don't care (and it's not their fault, it's mine).
• Focusing more on actual code. I can try to focus on motivating people to adventure into social networks application development using Perl, but the YAPC audience is more into actual development and coding techniques than money-making ideas.
• I still have to practice my speech. I took the time to write my lines scripts for each one of the slides, but that makes the interaction with the people a bit more difficult to establish.

And some interesting points around YAPC in general:

• In the auction, event that is done every year helping TPF raise some funds and that a similar approach would be great to have in conferences like DebConf, the highest bid for a lunch with Larry Wall reached one thousand dollars. I was a bit surprised.
• They took us in a tour at Heinz Field, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers, it was awesome, although it was already a bit late and couldn't take good pictures of the field. Pictures are on this Flickr set.
• I had some time at the end of my stay in Pittsburgh so I took the opportunity to go to PNC Park and watch the Pittsburgh Pirates kick one of their greatest rivals (as I learned there, because of the proximity), the Cleveland Indians. Pictures are on this set.
• Some people outside the venue also joined me on the conference as I setup an improvised ustream transmission. Unfortunately, I never got to press the "Start recording" button, so no video of it. Bummer. However, God willing, I will record my next delivery of the talk on YAPC::EU in Lisbon, in early August.

I've placed the slides on a PDF here. You can also clone the entire repository containing the source Keynote file.