YAPC::EU and course ideas

After spending time at OPW2010 with many wonderful people, I was exposed to the thought that YAPC::EU was in fact more better (double comparative), than YAPC::NA. So I decided to look into what exactly it would cost to spend a week in the wonderfully historic Pisa, Italy (where YAPC::EU::2010 will be) in the first week of August.

Yikes.

Airfare alone is frightening.

But I am not going to give up on the idea, at least, not until I consider other possibilities.

In IRC tonight, I had the spontaneous idea of perhaps putting together a course with the complete kit of course materials, exercises, etc. My idea of the class goes as such: Modernizing Legacy Perl Applications. Basically, we would explore a pre-modern Perl app (CGI.pm, raw blessed hashes, raw DBI, raw forking, etc) and modernize it over two days (16 hours total). Overall, the class would provide a practical crash course in various aspects of modern Perl (and lots of modules from Task::Kensho) and also a general outline for students to use when implementing their own revitalization project. It would be a tight squeeze for the time allotted, but so far, I haven't seen any other classes take such a tack for introducing modern Perl.

While classes that explore Moose and Catalyst at from the beginner and up level, no one seems to put it all together. I'd like to do that. And I'd like for it to be a source of compensation of costs to attend the wonderful YAPCs abroad.

Right now the course idea seems like an insurmountable task, but with a couple of interested parties willing to invest time into resources development and teaching, it is very feasible.

So we will see. I may see a leaning tower yet :)