Beth Skwarecki

I survived giving a talk at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop this weekend. Not only did I survive, the talk was well-attended and I heard from several people afterward that they liked it! Chris took this photo as proof that it really happened, since I was so tired there was a good chance I wouldn't have remembered. To everyone I met, or didn't meet, at the conference: If I had had more sleep, I would have gladly conversed [more] with you. About 15 minutes after my talk ended, I totally crashed. Thus, it was a good thing my talk was the first one in the morning!

My talk was called "Make your database work for you". To quote myself:

In this talk we'll learn how to let the database do the work it's good at. As a result, your programs will run faster, they'll be easier to maintain and debug, and many of your grunt-work tasks will be done by the database no matter what program accesses it. (We'll accomplish this, in part, by triggers written in Perl that live in the database. Isn't that cool?)

The talk also featured a technique that Marty suggested to me - building up a complex search module by intersecting SQL subqueries.

I procrastinated on preparing my talk until I got an email from the organizers saying "it's only two weeks until the conference!". If I could go back in time, I would give myself at least four weeks: three to prepare the talk at a more leisurely pace, and the last week just for rehearsing and polishing.

Slides with notes, inexplicably exported in black-and-white (sorry) are here.