Finally got through all my photos from Copenhagen. Unfortunately I'd only just bought my new camera, so many of the photos aren't as good as I would have liked. Still at least I have the memories
This is one of those journal entries, which should have been published a long time ago. Well the day after the last day of YAPC::Europe 2008 it should have been published, but the last day took a turn for the worse, which made me hesitate writing anything about the YAPC and the YAPC::Europe 2008 in particular until I had time to find out what to write.
I have been thinking this journal entry over and over again and I finally decided to sit down and just get it out of my system, the writing process would probably be good for me and for structuring my thoughts.
Day 3 went okay, I for one started feeling weary from the many days of conference. My dreams had begun to be extremely vivid, not your usual YAPC organizer nightmares, but just colorful crazy dreams, I expect to be a product to the exposure of so many people and inputs over such short time span. Anyway sleep was not sufficient and the organizing work is draining.
My wife call just after lunch, that they had called from the nursery that our youngest kid had a fever. We agreed she should pick him up, but I should come home as early as possible. I talked to tagg one of the other organizers and we agreed that I would leave in the afternoon, when things were slowing down.
The rest of the day went with practical duties and talking to attendees and speakers.
When I got home and the kids were activated and things was running smoothly I logged on to IRC so hear how things where going at the conference. The auction was still on and it just kept going... I was more focused on my fellow organizers being in charge of the clean up, so I phoned tagg and defekt and I was informed that it looked okay, there had cleaned up in the unused rooms and things did not look as if I was needed they were enough hands to close the venue down as soon as things died out.
The following days I was intensely scanning my RSS feeds for anything on YAPC::Europe, I skipped attending brian d foy's tutorial for which I was signed up, Sylvester was still having a fever and I was pretty tired too. I found this blog entry at first I thought, "What the guy never attended a YAPC before?", but it still bothered me, I heard that the auction had taken way too long and now this so I read some more blogs and talked to a few people attempting to get a picture of what had happened at the auction.
Attending Josh McAdams' 'Test Driven Development' tutorial I talked to some of the conference attendees and I got to see some pictures of the incident. A thread on Act users was also discussing the problem with the auction.
I have attended several YAPCs and I am of that opinion that the problems with auction has just been growing over the years. I am just incredibly saddened that it peaked at my YAPC. I will come back to the difficulties of being an YAPC organizer in a later journal entry.
I hope the 2008 auction does not scare people away from attending future YAPCs. It seems the Perl community itself is addressing the problems and nobody blames the organizers, as written earlier I will get back to this in a later journal entry.
I finally got to put face on some people from the Perl community I have not met before. There were also people attending whom I would have loved to talk to, but never got the time.
I also got to meet a lot of old friends and there where friend not attending that I hope I will see next year or perhaps at some other Perl community event, a lot of these seem to be popping up all over the landscape.
In general I had a marvelous conference, we made a lot of mistakes and there were many things we could/should have done differently or at least done and I have a large responsibility in this.
I personally enjoyed the conference in the extent possible (practically not seeing any talks) and it seemed like most people had a good time. I attempted to talk to as many people I could using people I already know as hooks in the crowd.
So a couple of weeks ago, I was over in Copenhagen for YAPC::Europe. Putting on a YAPC::Europe event, or any YAPC event for that matter, takes up a lot of thought and preparation time before the event. The organisers want to put on the best conference they can and the previous organisers and the supporting team from the YEF Venue Committee try and help with documents, advice and the like every year, but we are all still learning. So it's understandable that sometimes we don't get everything right, or we miss something. Having said that, each year the organisers do try something new or build on previous ideas with the aim of making the whole event a better experience for everyone. This year the Copenhagen guys tried some new things, some worked some didn't, and built on ideas from previous conferences, again some worked some didn't. In between all that there were also a few areas that lapsed. Overall it was a good conference, but it also highlighted some areas we can improve on for the future. In the survey feedback, several have picked on the successes and pitfalls, and most so far have offered some very good feedback and offered suggestions and ideas where they can, which is great, and is part of the purpose of the survey.
However, I would say it's worth bearing in mind that this is a completely volunteer effort (i.e. we don't get paid), none of us are professional conference organisers and we largely do it because we're passionate about Perl and love to bring the European community together to share ideas and meet each other in person. If things go wrong, think about the positive ways to suggest improvements. We're all human, and don't necessarily remember some of the obvious things. I'm sure if the Copenhagen guys were to do it all again, there would be several alterations they would have made to their planning.
This year's event was slightly more subdued than normal, partly I think due to the growing contingent for whom this is the first or second YAPC::Europe. In some respects that is good, as it means we are encouraging new people to the event each year, however, it also potentially means we are losing those who only make it to their local YAPC::Europe. The latter happens at all the YAPC::Europe events, and I can understand several reasons why people don't return for a second or more year. However, some of the reasons are perhaps that the event wasn't quite what they were expecting. I'd like to help that and perhaps make it something more of what people are expecting. What follows are some observations that I took away from Copenhagen and are meant to be food for thought, partly for future YAPC::Europe conferences, but also for any conference. Some are small niggles, while others will need to be addressed more suitably.
Communication before the event wasn't the best and caused a number of people, particularly regulars, to not attend as it was far too late to arrange anything once they had confirmation of costs and the like. This was unfortunate and has emphasised how important a PR type person is needed in the organising team. The Copenhagen team were focused on getting many other aspects of the conference organisation tasks done, that promotion of the event fell behind. Plans are afoot to make the communication much easier in the future, to the point that Twitter accounts and the like have been created to keep the information flow going. But I would say that if anyone has questions for the organisers, please email them. If they've forgotten something, more often than not they'll be glad of the reminder.
The one thing that I'm really glad Copenhagen did, was to provide lunchtime bags of food. It worked very well in the main, and saved attendees the hassle of going out to the nearby shops to find food. However, it wasn't perfect, as unfortunately the bags for the vegetarian options were mixed with the regular bags, and meant a lot of searching through the bags was required. But it was something that could have been easily resolved, had the organisers been made aware of it. In a similar situation, a large number of us are tea drinkers and abhor coffee. Now while I'm sure some were delighted to see Earl Grey and some fruit infusions, many were a bit disappointed to not find any regular tea (it turns out they call it "Classic Tea" in Denmark). As such I made a request for more such tea bags were made available, and they were for the rest of the conference breaks. My suggestion is to try and resolve similar situations at the time, rather than wait until a survey comes out to criticise the organisers.
The venue itself was brand new, and as such made it a little difficult to find. One comment from the survey suggested doing as Birmingham had done (which in turn, we built on from the Braga guys), with pictorial references of how to get from the airport to hotels and the venue. It meant the attendees could find their way with little problem of taking the wrong route. Despite some confusion, everyone pretty much did find the right building eventually, but it would have been better to have provided some clearer signage from the Metro station to the venue itself. As a note to future organisers of any conference, pretend you've just landed in the country, have no guide book and cannot speak the language. This applies equally to English speaking countries too. Could you get to your hotel or the venue with the instructions you've provided?
As with Birmingham and Vienna, Copenhagen utilised the "plasma screen" code, that Birmingham had in turn pinched from the LUGRadio guys. Projected on the main wall outside the main auditorium, the hourly schedule, together with a regular drop of Flickr photos, were highlighted for all to see. Even if you didn't have the schedule to hand, you could easily see what was coming up. I hope future organisers take this further, as it was a useful aid to remember what the time was, and what was coming up next. Plus it was nice to see the photos that people had posted without having to check on Flickr yourself. As the organisers chose not have any printed proceedings, some have mentioned that having something to hand that expanded beyond the title of a talk, such as a talk abstract, would have given them a much better idea of what to see. In future it might be interesting to see whether ACT can provide a simple PDF of all the talks and abstracts, which attendees can print out for themselves. Although, it does depend whether the author actually does include a decent abstract of course.
Although the main auditorium and first two rooms were more than adequate for their size, the 4th room, which proved rather popular for several talks, was more of a classroom size. Thankfully none of the talks I saw there were over subscribed, thanks partly due to the spread of attendees across 4 rather than 3 rooms, but it did highlight that getting the popular talks out of smaller rooms is important. In Birmingham we suffered with this, despite trying to rearrange some of the talks at short notice. This year, just before the conference, Éric Cholet managed to add a feature to ACT that enabled attendees to select the talks they planned to see. While a fun feature, it's usefulness for future organisers is likely to be a life-saver. Having the ability to see which talks are likely to generate the most interest, will mean they have more options before the event to juggle the schedule to get all the talks into the right rooms.
Regards the talks themselves, there was a good selection of talks, covering all sorts of interests and levels of ability. However, it isn't always obvious from the title or abstract what level of knowledge is required for the talk, and whether it is an introduction, in-depth or discussion type talk. As a consequence it makes it a little difficult when there are several talks to choose from, which one is most likely to be most appropriate for you. Hopefully speakers can be prompted better in future to describe their talks a little better, so beginners don't attend expert talks and visa versa.
The 30 minute length for talks also didn't work for me. I was fortunate, as my Understanding Malware talk was able to span two sessions, but I was the only one to do so, and the talk needed that time slot to cover the subject matter. There were several other talks that I felt would have benefited from more time and equally several talks that really only merited 20 minutes, as the extra 10 minutes felt like padding. We had a cross-section of experienced speakers and new speakers this year, and while some of the newer speakers handled their presentations well, some didn't. At more corporate conferences, I've seen Mark Jason Dominus and Damian Conway give excellent presentations on how to give presentations. There are some techniques suggested by both that I now use in my own presentations. Now while those presentations are on the web somewhere, it would be wonderful to get those guys to do a special session, particularly for new speakers, so they can help all speakers improve both their presentation materials and the way they present the subject matter. Some of the new guys just need that little bit of guidance, as their subject matter is interesting.
The four tracks idea can work, but it can also spread talks too thin. This year, I didn't feel there was a lot of benefit to having four tracks, apart from making sure everyone who submitted a talk got accepted. Although I would encourage new speakers to propose talks, I do think the acceptance of talks from new speakers needs a bit of a review. Is the speaker qualified to speak on the subject? Have other similar talks already been submitted by more experienced speakers? We should also get a stronger weighting of experienced speakers rather than new speakers, as in the main most want to be taught something. General interest talks or discussion talks are worth having, but they're usually better handled by experienced speakers. As mentioned above, some of the new speakers did have interesting subject matter to present, so there are definitely some that would still get through the selection criteria, but I feel it's more important to have a strong line-up of talks, than necessarily having a slot for everyone who submitted a talk.
Regarding this last aspect, one post on use.perl, has annoyed me perhaps rather more than it should have. I have no idea who was supposedly promoting themselves rather a lot, as it wasn't obvious to me (or maybe it was me!). But what offended me is the inference that once you've presented a talk, that you should never speak again! Perhaps that wasn't the intention of the original poster, but it does bother me that people assume that they can see all 70+ talks throughout the whole 3 days. In previous years the survey has been useful to see who attendees would like to have seen, both in terms of talks they missed, or speakers that were unable to attend the event. Usually it highlights a few talks that would be worth repeating, following several requests to see them. Surely knowing you've seen a few talks before, gives you more opportunity to see the other talks! A good portion of the attendees have never seen those talks, and as far as they are concerned everyone is fresh blood. Anyway why shouldn't experienced speakers have the chance to give others the benefit of their knowledge? If they're good presenters, get them back as much as possible, both to present new and interesting ideas, but to also help new presenters of the future see how well it can be done. I also wonder whether the OP has ever submitted a talk? If you want fresh blood, put yourself on the spot, and don't expect others to give you a comfortable life.
There are some talks I've given, which having gone down well I've considered repeating every so often, but hearing such comments from people that they've seen it all before puts me off. However, probably over half of the attendance have never seen some of the talks I've previously presented. Do we really have to have completely fresh talks every year? Personally I don't think so and I think there is some value in repeating talks, especially if they cover a worthwhile subject for new attendees. I was actually pleased to have Chris Williams speaking about CPAN Testers, as it gives others a chance to carry on the promotion, and not just me. Had he not have done so, I would have done it, as I think reminding people about CPAN Testers and encouraging people to get involved is important. There are other projects that are equally deserving of promotion and involvement, and talks at YAPCs are an ideal opportunity to repeatedly promote them.
Something that is becoming more and more obvious regarding the scheduling these days, is that we are trying to cram far too much into the day. The early starts were a trial for many, as they were fighting late nights (including hangovers for some), jet-lag and the general intensive mental focus of the day. Remember that most of us don't get away from our computers that much during the general work-day, so focused training, discussion and socialising can be extremely exhausting. While it may well mean that you have to accept less talks, I would rather see more time given to discussion periods. One such casulty were The Birds of a Feather sessions this year as due to over-running it left little time after the main event to hold them. On Wednesday the CPAN Testers BOF went ahead, and was reasonably well attended, but after an hour of discussion, at 7pm it made for a very long conference day. It also meant we were far too late for the Vertical Metre Of Beer Party that Adam Kennedy and Jos Boumans were hosting. On Thursday, again due to over-running, there was no time left for any BOFs, as we were supposed to be at the Conference Dinner venue by 6.30pm. I was disappointed that the Perl Mongers BOF didn't happen, as from previous versions of this BOF, it has been a good sounding board to get new groups started, and energize groups into thinking about organising a YAPC::Europe themselves. This year we didn't get that chance.
Speaking of the socialising aspect, the pub that was chosen for the pre-conference meeting point, and subsequent free evenings, wasn't really suitable for the large number of people that came along. Understandably finding one pub or bar that can accommodate everyone is going to be difficult, but if there is anywhere that has a selection, so that attendees can hop from one to the other is often much better. This worked well in Braga, as in the town centre, even if people disappeared off for food, they all came back later and there was plenty of room outside for us to chat and drink. Of course it helps that Portugal mostly has decent weather! The pub suggested by the Copenhagen guys, The Globe, was an Irish pub, and wasn't too bad. Certainly several of the UK contingent liked the food and beer served up. But it didn't allow for everyone to easily mingle and chat. As a consequence, after meeting there for a first pint, people organised eating parties and headed off to other restaurants. It meant there wasn't really a place where people could meet up together, drink, chat and socialise into the evening and night. There were several people I never quite felt I got the chance to really chat to over the week, and would have loved to have spent more time just relaxing in good company.
Although it might sound like I didn't have a great time in Copenhagen, I did. These are just observations that I thought were worth sharing, rather than just in the feedback form of the survey. There was a lot of things that I really liked about the conference, but there were several things that I do hope future organisers, whether a YAPC or any other conference, might bare in mind. I am now planning to completely overhaul the conference documents that have been on Google Docs, as although a lot of the content is still relevant, there is more to add, and I want to better present it for organisers. At the moment it's a long read and I'm not convinced it gets digested as it currently is.
I would like to thank all the Copenhagen crew for their efforts. While there were some problems and lessons to be learnt, the event itself largely did go well. The crew were very friendly and helpful, there were some great talks, it was a good venue and I'm glad I finally got to visit the city of Copenhagen. I had a great time, and would love to go back to Copenhagen for a longer sight seeing visit.
My biggest disappointment of the event though, is completely and utterly my own fault. As with Vienna I had plans to make a note of people attending who I would like to meet in person and find them and say hello. Once again this year I failed miserably. So next time around, in case I forget, can Aristotle, Diego, George and Steffen come and say hello
Next year I'm sure that they'll be other things that I'll be thinking didn't go as planned, but I'm pretty sure I'll still have a great time regardless, as I did this year. I guess I just worry too much
jeah i was there listen to talks. even gave one, promoted Kephra but most importantly: i hunted a dozen heads down to organize or extract informations i needed. beside alias, renee, stefan, larry, damian, gabor, josh and so on. The topics where YAML::Tiny, Strawberry Perl, Kephra, Summer of Code, our upcoming WxPerl Workshop, an Interview about Kephra, Perl 6 OOP Parameter (Damian), my Talk and lots of other stuff. so I was busy while still had time to explore Kobenhavn and prepare my talk JIT.
On the back tour i was also visiting jens "jenne" neuwerk which drawn a new icons and revisited some other. there are also some issues with Kephra and i want to emulate the eval thing from padre so expect new version soon.
Following on from the release of the YAPC::Europe 2008 Survey, I'm pleased to have just launched a companion set of surveys for the Master Class tutorials. Although the Course Assessment Form is perhaps not as verbose as the main survey, I've collated several ideas from other assessment forms to get a brief idea of what attendees thought of the course, to allow them to make suggestions for improvement, and to highlight what they thought was good about the course.
With currently over 60% of responses in from those polled on the main survey, I'm hoping that a good proportion, if not all, will respond to the feedback for the individual courses. The results will be collated and sent to the presenters once all their attendees have responded, or just after October 30th (the closing date). This is essentially a trial, as suggested by Dave Cross, to enable the tutorial presenters to get some form of feedback on the courses they presented before and after YAPC::Europe in Copenhagen.
It has also been suggested that each regular talk should have a similar feedback mechanism. However, whereas the tutorials required a signup, so we have their exact attendees, the regular talk sessions are a little more ad-hoc. It could be opened up as a free-for-all to enter what they like about a particular talk, but there is no guarantee that the respondent saw the talk. Having said that, several of the respondents have chosen not to rate the talks in the main survey, so it's likely to improve feedback for the presenter at the very least.
My intention was to roll this into ACT, but for the YAPC::Europe surveys at least, I'm not so sure that it needs to be. Having the survey independent of the ACT system (although I do use the attendee lists from ACT), and the fact that one person (me) is currently controlling access to that data to ensure anonymity, may actually be providing a degree of confidence in the privacy of comments, etc. I'll have to see what the Lisbon guys want to do, but I'll be happy to provide the same setup (if not more extensive) for the surveys next year.
Given that most of July and August for me was spent attending conferences, travel, vacation, and periods of limited network connectivity, it's been a while since I've been able to update Rakudo progress. So, this is a very brief update, to be followed by a longer post in a day or so.
First, we continue to make progress on passing more spectests. As of this writing Rakudo is passing 2278 spectests. A graph of our progress is available from http://www.pmichaud.com/perl6/rakudo-tests-2008-08-25.png. Much of the credit for passing tests over the past few weeks goes to Jonathan Worthington, Moritz Lenz, and Carl Mäsak (again, apologies if I've overlooked anyone). It's really good to see progress coming from so many sources.
OSCON and YAPC::EU were both excellent conferences, my compliments to the organizers of each of those. In particular, Jonathan, Allison, and I were able to use our time together at YAPC::EU to discuss and map out many of the outstanding issues for Parrot and Rakudo, which we can now begin documenting and implementing over the next few weeks and months. These include things like code initialization, handling Perl 6 parameter passing and signatures, MMD, strings, and many other issues.
One of the outcomes of this was that early last week I finally got the code in place to enable pre-compiled Perl 6 modules to function properly. At the moment this has a quite dramatic effect on running the spectest regression suite, because we aren't having to parse and recompile Test.pm on each test file execution (and parsing is still our biggest bottleneck). So, running the regression suite dropped from twelve minutes to under four minutes on my system, which isn't quite so interminable.
Of course, the next step will be to enable Rakudo to compiler Perl 6 programs into standalone PIR or PBC files that can automatically load the Perl 6 runtime. I expect to accomplish this sometime this week -- at present we need some refactors to the signature generation code that is blocking this from happening.
We're also working on enabling parts of the standard runtime library ("Prelude") to be written in Perl 6 and precompiled by Rakudo, instead of having it all written in PIR. As part of this we may implement a Perl 6-with-inline-PIR capability to help with the builtins, to make it easier to attach MMD signatures to the builtin functions and make sure they're exported properly.
We also have more of the interface for loading external modules (written in PIR or otherwise) specified, and will be working on that over the next couple of weeks.
At the YAPC::EU hackathon, Jesse Vincent and I also spent some time updating the Rakudo ROADMAP document. This newer version of the ROADMAP identifies some of the specific components that are left to be developed, along with estimates of their complexity and dependencies. If you look at the document you'll see some notations about how long it will take to develop each feature; these estimates are all in "idealized programmer units". An "idealized programmer unit" here assumes that the people involved have no interruptions or distractions, has all of the needed prerequisites in place, is mentally charged and ready for programming, doesn't have to wait to coordinate questions or answers with others, etc. As such, the times given should be taken only as relative estimates of task difficulty, and not how long a particular task will take in real-world time units.
The major subsystem redesign coming up for Rakudo will be changes to the parser and grammar engine to support protoregexes and longest token matching. This will enable us to support even more of the STD.pm "standard grammar". I expect much of this work to take place over the next four calendar months, as many elements are likely to require some intensive and sustained design and development effort (while trying to maintain progress in other areas). More on this as it progresses.
Pm
In the last times there is this 'Epic Fail' or 'Epic Mega Fail' usage for everything. The Portuguese guys on YAPC::EU::2009 used it a lot, as well. So much, that I come back and wrote this ACME module. It doesn't do much. Specially because I am in vacations without much Internet access, and thus, not being able to discuss it properly. Thus, this post is a call for ideas: what can I do to make this ACME module more ACME interesting?
Memoirs of an OSCON rockstar, Day 4 (Human Interfaces for Geeks)
My sleeping pattern at OSCON remains sub-optimal. I've crossed timezones, and beause there are so many cool tings to do each evening, and talk practicing and preparation, I find myself going to bed late and sleeping in. I could push myself to wake up early, but being sleepy really wrecks my speaking ability, and after my talk on failure, I've got a reputation to maintain.
I wake up late in the morning, and receive what was the most exicting e-mail I'd received in the entire conference. It's from Allison Randal:
Would you be willing to repeat "An Illustrated History of Failure" [as a plenary]? It'd be 12:45pm Friday.
Woah!
At this point I should mention that presenting a plenary/keynote at OSCON is one of my lifetime goals. I thought that I'd gain a little fame at 2008, a somewhat bigger audience in 2009, and then if I'm very very lucky I could possibly be considered for a plenary/keynote in 2010. I certainly didn't expect it at my first OSCON! The only lifetime goal I thought I would have had a chance of claiming at OSCON was to play Rock Band.
Today I'm presenting "Human Interfaces for Geeks", aka "Hacking Wetware for Fun and Profit", aka "Paul can't make up his mind as to what this talk should be called". My talk is essentially about how people think, how to make them happy, and how making them happy causes them to do your bidding.
When possible, I try to include conference-specific jokes in my talks. In my failure talk I managed to reference Rod::Logic and Dr. Evil Conway. Here, I figured that enough of my audience would have gone to People for Geeks, so last night I had picked Schwern as my victim. Schwern had kindly provided me with some pictures of him as a zombie, and I spent way too long last night creating Schwern in The Sims 2, taking screenshots, turning him into a zombie, and adding general zombie references.
I arrive at OSCON in time for lunch, rather sad that I've missed some of the morning talks I was really looking forward to. I'm also stuck for where I should go after lunch; Anthony Baxter's running the general lightning talks, and I love lightning talks. Anthony runs the lightning talks at OSDC, and Linux.conf.au, and he does a great job of keeping things moving and amusing. I've got stacks of lightning talks up my sleeve, so attending this should have been a no-brainer.
However, Tim Bunce of DBI fame is giving a talk on Ultimate Perl Code Profiling. I'd spoken briefly to Tim earlier in the week, and he told me new the profiler is awesomely cool. I know that I could learn it in my own time, but that will probably take months before I get a round tuit, or I could just attend Tim's talk and download it into my head in one go.
I attend Tim's talk. It is awesome. I know kung-fu.
I sneak out of Tim's talk during question time, because my talk is next. I find coffee and hurry to the room where I'm presenting.
Amazingly, the talk goes down extermely well. I seem to have been gaining popularity over the conference, and now not only is the room stuffed with people, but there's even a handheld video camera in the audience! It seems the audience wasn't disappointed, giving me a 4.9/5.0 across 16 ratings! Wow.
Next up are the Perl Lightning Talks. I wasn't sure what to expect from these, as I've seen lightning talks done really bad, but these are just superb! The Perl community has some great speakers, and the talks are witty, informative, and well presented. Of course, I give one on autodie, in case the conference hasn't heard enough about it already.
The conference ends with Larry's "State of the Onion", and the Perl Foundation Auction. Unfortunately things run a little late, and we lose a few too many audience members before the auction. I pick up a copy of Perl Medic (autographed, yay!), a few assorted other books, and some cool YAPC drinking glasses.
With the main conference over, I head off to a rather exclusive OSCON after-party. Everyone at the party is famous. Everyone. In fact, as r0ml casually comments to me that his son wrote Twisted (python), I realise that everyone and their families are famous.
The party was amazing, although I continue to make the odd faux pas: "Oh, you use identi.ca too?", "No, I'm @evan. I wrote identi.ca." Eventually I get used to the idea that if someone mentions a technology I use, then not only did they write said technology, but they also hold a Nobel Prize, played a role in the original Star Wars, and psychically know what I want to drink next.
Eventually the party gets broken up. It's probably the first time I've ever been to a party so cool that it gets broken up rather than just peters out. I head back to my hotel, discover I'm hungry, and go looking for food at 3am. I find a Mexican place that gives me the most awesome burrito I've ever had in my life, but since I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, when I return there the next day I'm served something which is considerably less than awesome.
Eventually I get back to the hotel, set multiple alarms so I don't miss my talking slot, and sleep.
I've been using the free komodo editor for the past few months - since I finally got too frustrated with the slow memory-hog that is Eclipse/EPIC (and this is
I managed to buy one of the perl Dev-Kits that were auctioned off in Copenhagen last week.
There must have been a bit of confusion, as it was advertised as "including komodo", which it wasn't - but ActiveState were good enough to let me have a license for the Komodo IDE instead of the Dev-Kit, as that was what I was really interested in.
Within about ten seconds of loading the IDE up, I was grinning, and very happy with my purchase.
The subroutine select-menu, the code browser, svn integration, DOM browser - this is what eclipse/EPIC tries to be - but this fast!
Granted, I only paid 300 DKK, not the usual 295 USD - but now that I've seen the product and started working with it - I'll certainly be getting my $work to buy any upgrades that come out.
I have launched the yapc.tv website, which is intended to collect videos from Perl events we all organize.
I am not quite sure what will it be in a month of a year, but currently I am (very slowly) adding videos that were made at YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen, starting from lightning talks.
There are some ideas how to make video recodings more cool (all current ones suck in different aspects). I am going to implement one brilliant idea at Italian Perl Workshop in September if the organizers allow me do that
Special thanks to Henrik Tougaard, who had presented me a tripod to replace one I forget at home.
By the way, perl.tv domain was already registered, but I find yapc.tv name very nice.
P. S. If anyone can offer of suggest hosting where I could freely put large FLV files, please let me know. The problem is that foreign traffic is free for me untill it is less than traffic which goes inside Russia. Google, YouTube, Vimeo etc. are quite good but there I will not be able to manipulate video transformations as I wish.
Overall impressions are good: I've had a very busy schedule, I've been to a talk for every single time slot, and there is not a talk I've been to that I considered a waste of time. So that is good.
To be honest: I didn't really expect catering, so that was a pleasant surprise, not in the least because Denmark is so expensive. What was even a better surprise is that the quality of the food was good. It was a lot better than anything I've ever been offered to eat on an airplane, for example.
I'm not going to discuss "the incident", not even while I was in the middle of it, because I had already largely forgotten about it. It's not that important.
But there still is something that irks me. I feel that some people who have been to YAPC more than once, use it to put themselves in the spotlight. I'm not going to mention names, I'm not even going to say about how many people I am talking, because I do not want this to degenerate into a mindless, meritless flamewar, plus, I am not the one who is going to draw the line of what is or is not acceptable. You have to think about that for yourself.
In short, I do think that not always the same people should be in the center of attention. Especially people of whom I think they don't really deserve it. I think it's time to put a stop to the ego-tripping.
So, for next time... Please don't always let the same people present the show. And don't let all the talks be given by all the same people every year, if they have nothing new to say. It is time for fresh blood.
(I did promise a more cheerful post, and at the moment, my alternative to writing this is to read more articles about the 15th century eastern Mediterranean, and try to come up with a research proposal, whose success or failure will determine whether I get to continue to have an academic career. No pressure or anything.)
So YAPC this year was a blast, just like last year. I spent much of Day 1 vaguely out of sorts as I generally do ("who do I want to say hello to and haven't found yet? What am I missing? What are the cool kids doing that no one has told me about?" etc.) but that had thankfully passed by the end of the day. Day 2 was overshadowed by rising worry about my presentation ("will I remember what I want to say? Will I run embarrassingly over? Will it make any sense?") which subsided for the duration of the conference dinner and came back in force on the morning of day 3. The presentation went well though; I got a lot of compliments and a few good questions, and was mostly unable to eat my lunch due to being kept talking about various things. I'll take that last as a sign of success.
What I will probably do here in this journal, over the next little while, is go over the data model and algorithm model of my collation engine—basically all the technical bits of my project that were left out of my presentation for being heavy on explanation and light on humor. Some of you will probably have better ideas than I would about the various data models, and many of you will have opinions about DB design (since I haven't yet implemented data persistence.) Lots of you will be way better at algorithms than I am. With any luck I can even get a few of you to volunteer opinions on user interfaces, which is the next best thing to releasing the core module on CPAN and letting someone else write a UI.
The "Armenian studies" version of this presentation will be on 11 September in Paris, so I'm hoping to make a little more progress on the code before then, though I'll still need time to make the presentation a little more palatable to a very different audience. (Really sorry, domm, but the yak will have to go. They just wouldn't get it.)
At the end of my "Perl in RPM-Land" talk at YAPC::Europe, I sketched out an idea about automatically generating RPMs from CPAN modules. I fully expected people so tell me that I was talking nonsense, but it seems that a number of other people had been thinking along similar lines.
In order to carry on the discussion, I've set up a mailing list. Please subscribe if you're interested in this subject.
I've also submitted a talk to the London Perl Workshop to report on the project's progress. This is known as Conference Driven Development - I now need to ensure that we've made some kind of progress to prevent this presentation from being very embarrassing.
I've received some nice feedback about Test::Kit. A number of people at YAPC::EU also told me it sounded interesting, so I made the mistake of promising I'd have an alpha out by conference end. I made that deadline, but now there's a lot of work to do. I have three main things resolve:
In particular, while it's possible to create something just like Test::Most, it's not particularly easy, so the first thing I need to do is eat my own dog food.
Regarding YAPC::EU, I was astonished when the Lisbon, Portugal delegation opened their talk with my promotional video for a Lisbon YAPC. Sitting in a lecture hall with a few hundred people and watching your video on a large screen can be a wee bit intimidating. Fortunately, it went over well and people laughed in the right places (whew). I'll have to do more. That would be fun. Anybody want a video for a conference?
In other news, the Copenhagen conference was fantastic and, once again, I'm terribly impressed with what the organizers put together. They're a tough act to follow.
So next year's YAPC::EU will be held in Lisbon, Portugal, and will be organized, once again, by Alberto and myself.
We have a lot of ideas and we're eager to get all of them accomplished.
Finally having a partner program is one of those ideas, as is having an arrival survival kit being sent to the attendees *before* the conference takes place (with a map, simple indications, etc).
A beginner's track will be part of our program, which is likely to both attract conference newcomers and delight the eyes, ears, and brains, of those who sometimes find the regular talks too technical.
You have one year to plan, so it's going to be harder for you to convince yourself that you're missing this wonderful conference because of somebody else.
We'll be with you all the way.
We're working to put together an amazing conference, we'll be pointing you to where to stay, where to eat, what do to, and how to get here, and we'll be preparing a partner program, so you can bring your family along with you to Lisbon, land where the good beer is really cheap and whe
