DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop has come to a close and the organizers should be proud of what they accomplished. The comment was made at the after conference dinner that they make it looks easy when really we all know it’s not.

I spent a lot of the hallway track talking to different people about technologies that weren’t perl but shared amongst us all, and a lot of time talking to @genehack. Getting out and talking geek was my intention for this conference and for that to me made it successful.

I had planned all along to give a talk on Fixup and Autosquash, it’s one of those things that time and time again I run into developers who don’t know about this combination of git commands, or know of them but not understanding how to put them to good use. I did the talk as a Lightning Talk, as I didn’t expect there to be enough content to fill a full half hour. After which @genehack advised me that fleshing out the examples a bit more could easily fill the 30 minutes.

I have been giving numerous talks to our local perl Mongers group, and by giving this talk I’ve learned that what works with a small group or via a streamed talk, doesn’t work with a larger group staring at a screen on a wall. While all of my talks tend to include code examples that syntax and code highlighting can display and separate quite well, shouldn’t be used as the only mechanism in a larger setting. This is something that I’ll work on.

One thing I do really like is after a talk people sharing their experiences or another mechanism to do something I’ve discussed. In this instance it was the use of an empty initial commit to allow easier rebasing of the first commit. It was pointed out that the --root option allows for rebasing an initial commit.

“git rebase [-i] –root

$tip” can now be used to rewrite all the history leading to “$tip” down to the root commit.

From the git release notes for version 1.7.12

This is not something I’ve had a chance to use yet, but will give it a try.

As I said all in all I think the conference was a success, and I’m grateful to the organizers for putting the conference together.