OSCON: first tutorial day

Yesterday was the first tutorial day at OSCON. Due to some planning mistakes, I didn't get the correct conference pass, so I missed the first tutorial. After that was sorted out I proceeded to the second tutorial of the day: Advanced Techniques for Parsing, by Mark Dominus. Of course I knew that the code would be Perl, but that didn't disturb me so much, since I expected to see some advanced parsing techniques. This is where disappointment hit me. Maybe it was advanced Perl code used, but it was not in any way advanced parsing. The first 2 hours were spent implementing a recursive descent parser with 7 productions. After that, I decided that I wouldn't be learning anything from this presentation, and headed back to the hotel, which was good, since I got sick that afternoon and spent the rest of the evening slightly delirious in my bed.

But now I'm up and going again, sitting here waiting for the tutorial "Real World Grails" to begin. I'm looking forward to see how Grails is actually used, since the presentations I've seen on it usually just show scaffolding and simpler things.

I have also decided on the subject for tonights FOSCON, but the slides are not finished yet. And the topic I choose is kind of a cop out: JRuby Cavalcade is the title of the talk, and I will basically just run through loads of interesting and funny JRuby things until I run out of time or gets booed of stage. Hope to see you there!