Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, traditionally hosts the largest Free Software conference on the planet: FISL 9.0 (Forum Internaticional de Software Livre). This year, in it's 9th edition, 7417 attendees packed the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS)
to see talks delivered by free software authorities from around the globe.
The annual YAPC::SA happens during the event, as the conference offers physical space and infrastructure to free software user groups. We exposed some of the Shadowcat merchandise at the Perl Mongers stand,
the frisbee and bag stock ran out quickly, but I saved some for the end of the YAPC::SA talks. Wallace Reis and I delivered talks on DBIx::Class and Catalyst. We arrived late because Google had sponsored a barbecue dinner at a typical southern restaurant, which had live exhibitions of local folklore.
Added onto that, my macbooks' video interface wasn't compatible with the projector so I had someone in the audience lend me a pen drive and I transferred the talk over to Wallace's laptop. At the end of the talks I threw over a few frisbees into the audience, nearly hitting one of the attendees' head.
Besides YAPC::SA, FISL 9.0 hosted several other free-software events, including Debian's 15th anniversary
and a demonstration of robots built from recycled electronic components.
At the talkers' lounge I got to meet Jon "Maddog" Hall and Ken Coar
which are both very amusing figures. I also got to meet Josh Berkus and David Fetter's traditional presence rendered a nice chat about databases and ORM's.
Randal Schwartz also delivered an impressive talk on Seaside, a Smalltalk MVC web framework (http://www.seaside.st/) which will consume my free time on the course of the next few months.
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