I’m pleased to see that the Enlightened Perl Organisation are running the send-a-newbie program again this year.  They are raising money in order to send community member to YAPC::EU in Riga. These grants are specifically for people who have never attended a major Perl event before, and who require financial assistance in order to attend.

I’ve been reading about problems in the Perl community.  Although I’m involved in the community it’s a hard thing for me to define.  I suppose it’s many communities that are linked by Perl.

I’m involved with administration and as a consequence deal with quite a small set of people on a daily basis.  This makes my main Perl community a small group of volunteers that I have a lot of respect for.

I travel to a variety of conferences and get to meet another section of the community.  I’m always going to prefer face-to-face interactions over electronic ones and I really enjoy talking to other community members. I try to meet up with Perl Mongers when I travel, even when on holiday, and I have met some amazing people.

I am involved with some virtual Perl communities.  I am trying to get used to IRC, but I’m not great at it.  I avoid mailing lists unless it’s really neccesary for me to be part of them.  I read lots of blog posts but rarely comment.

I love the diversity in the various Perl communities that I’m involved with.

I am aware that there are problems, problems to do with expectations.  When I deal with people in the community directly I’m expecting them to be polite.  And I imagine they are expecting me to be polite.  This is especially true when I’m dealing with people I don’t know.

Every community ends up with its own rules of conduct. When dealing with large groups of people, people who don’t know each other, the behaviour is picked up from the other members of the group.  It’s like walking into a room that’s incredibly clean and tidy.  It feels wrong to leave your things sitting around.  But if you walk into a messy environment you don’t think twice about throwing your bag on the floor. Our behaviour is affected by the environment.  If you lurk on a list for a while and every email message is polite, your first message will probably also be polite.

I meet many members of the Perl community who want the community to grow.  And for it to flourish I believe we need to treat each other with respect.  There are so many people in the community that I do respect that it’s not that hard a thing for me to do.  I don’t like them all, I don’t agree with them all, but I can be polite, and I can be civil.  I have found that by doing so that nearly every member of the community that I encounter is polite and civil to me.

I think the Perl community is great, but also that it can be greater.

The Perl Foundation (TPF) is once again taking part in Google’s Summer of Code.  This is a great program but I always think that the timescales are quite tight.  Student applications need to be submitted by the 8th April which only gives the accepted organizations 3 weeks to find their students.  This year Florian Ragwitz is running the program for The Perl Foundation and Jonathan Leto is running the program for the Parrot Foundation.  Mark Keating has been working hard promoting this project and I’m hoping that we manage to at least match the number of students we had last year.

I need to decide which conferences I will attend this year.  At the minute I am only certain about two – YAPC::NA in Asheville and YAPC::EU in Riga.

I am considering attending OSCON, mainly to help out with TPF‘s booth, but there are three weeks between it and YAPC::NA.  I don’t know if I want to stay in America for those three weeks as doing that will mean being away from home for about 6 weeks in total.  YAPC::EU is two weeks after OSCON so it would make sense to travel from America to Europe, if I attend OSCON.  But that would mean being away from home for nearly 10 weeks.  That will be very expensive and very tiring.  The thought of flying to and from Japan for all three conferences is also fairly horrifying.

The OSCON call for papers closes soon but for someone who talks so much I can’t think of anything worth saying.

I imagine that I will attend YAPC::Asia.  Even if it isn’t held in Tokyo it’s going to be closer to me that the American or European conferences.  I’d also like to attend OSDC in Australia, but I’ll make a decision on that once the dates have been announced.

I have been thinking about 2010 and the different things that happened in the Perl community.  I’m not a good writer, nor do I have a lot of time to write, so I’m going to create a list:  a list of the things in the Perl world that I thought were great in 2010.  The following are in the order that they came out of my brain:

1. The release of Perl 5.12

Jesse Vincent and the release managers gave us not only a new stable version of Perl but also a new time-based release cycle for future versions of Perl, so we will have Perl 5.14 to look forward to this year.

2. The release of Rakudo Star

Giving me hope for the future of Perl 6.

3. Dave Mitchell’s Perl 5 Bug Fixing Grant

Dave has been doing amazing work with this grant having spent just over 500 hours in 2010 to close 127 bugs.  I’m delighted that this grant has been extended and that Dave can continue this work into 2011.

4. GSoC and Google Code-In

Jonathan Leto and his team did a great job of getting The Perl Foundation and The Parrot Foundation involved in Google Summer of Code and the new Google Code-In.

5. Matt Trout’s State of the Velicoraptor Talk at YAPC

I really liked hearing Matt give this uplifting talk at YAPC::EU and YAPC::NA.  I enjoyed hearing about all the positive things that were happening in the Perl world and think that all our conferences need a positive keynote like this one.

6. CPAN Testers

I read just the other day that CPAN Testers has just passed 10 million test reports!

7. Events Group

A group of volunteers decided to set-up Perl booths at a number of non-Perl conferences including FOSDEM and CeBIT.

8. Modernisation of Perl Web Sites

This year many of the major Perl sites had a face lift, including perl.com, perl.org, and news.perlfoundation.org.

9. Send-A-Newbie program

The Enlightened Perl Organisation took over the send-a-newbie program that provides financial support to first time attendees of YAPC::EU.

10. Miyagawa

I know, it might seem like a strange thing to write, but when I think of Perl I think of people.  And I’m always astounded by the amount of work that Miyagawa does and I’m certainly looking forward to what will come out of his brain in 2011.

2010 was a great year for Perl, let’s hope that 2011 is just as excellent!

I gave my first talk in Japanese at YAPC::Asia last week.  It was a lightning talk, so I only had to speak for five minutes.  It was incredibly nerve wrecking even though I had spent hours practising.  I dread to think what my accent was like and I completely messed up one of my lines but I’m glad that I tried.  It also means that I have completed another item on my “101 Things to Do in 1001 Days” list.

YAPC::Asia is over.  Actually the conference ended over a week ago but for me it only finished when my house guests left.  Miyagawa said, “actually it gets over once you blog it, so if you haven’t, blog it now”.   I’ve been so busy that I haven’t blogged about anything in weeks, but it’s about time I said something about the conference.

YAPC::Asia is still the biggest YAPC in the world, this year with 518 registered attendees.  I don’t believe that they all turned up on the day, but there were still a lot of people there.  Well, a lot of men, as less than 3% of the attendees were female.

For me YAPC::Asia is very different than YAPC::NA or YAPC::EU.  At the other conferences the social aspect is very important but in Asia I have a language problem.  There is some sort of hallway track, though it seemed mostly a outdoor picnic track, but I wouldn’t easily be able to participate.  I also become much too tired to attend the evening social events as hours of listening to Japanese tires me out.  (Since moving to Japan I have nothing but admiration for the conference attendees and speakers I meet who are always dealing with their non-native language).

The conference is very quiet at the opening and becomes fairly noisy by the time the lightning talks begin at the end of the day.  Larry Wall opened the conference and I had to try not to giggle too loudly at some of his dreadful puns and word-plays as most of the audience was listening in respectful silence.  I have been told by speakers that it can be very difficult speaking in Asia as you don’t get a lot of feedback from the audience during your talk.  Jesse Vincent overcame that problem during his keynote.  He managed to get the twitter stream scrolling across his slides during his talk which made it one of the most interactive talks I’ve seen at a YAPC::Asia.

I’m always impressed by how much effort the volunteers put into organising the conference and there is no doubt that this conference was well organised.  This is one thing, however, that I would change.  There was no scheduled lunch break.  This meant that I left the conference at around 1pm and missed the talks that were scheduled at that time.  I don’t think this was really fair on the speakers as I imagine that many people left to eat lunch.  It also lead to a bit of confusion around what was happening at lunch as people tried to work out if there was a mistake in the schedule or not.

It was the last conference I plan to attend this year, and I’m glad it was a good one.

I spent a couple of hours this morning practising my Japanese accent with my teacher.  I am working on a lightning talk for YAPC::Asia.  I don’t know if this talk will be accepted but even if it isn’t this is an interesting learning experience.  Usually it’s a text book that determines what I learn next and not something that I wrote myself.  This can lead to me learning about things that I never use in day to day life and, as a consequence, things I quickly forget.  The talk contains concepts that I actually want to be able to speak about.  With help from a friend I now know the correct way to say “Perl” and “YAPC” in Japanese.  And I also know how to talk about altering clothing.

I am having quite a few problems with my accent.  It’s not terrible when I am speaking normally but speaking in a loud voice amplifies every imperfection.  I am having problems with pitching and with some sounds.  The length of my vowels isn’t always correct and there are sounds that I find nearly impossible to say in combination.

I’m also having problems finding my voice in Japanese.  At times I sound overly girly.  I end up speaking in a higher pitched voice than usual because many Japanese woman have high pitched voices.  It works, in a Japanese context, but my teacher can’t imagine me sustaining it for 5 minutes.  If my voice becomes too low I apparently sound scary and not friendly enough.  I’m not sure where my real voice is hiding but I need to find it before the middle of October.

I submitted my 10 Things To Do With A Conference T-shirt talk to YAPC::Asia.  I could give this talk in English, but I’ve been in Japan for over three years now and I think it’s time to attempt a Japanese talk.  There is no way that I am ready to give a full-length talk in Japanese but I should be able to manage 5 minutes.

I have written the talk description in Japanese, which I will include in this post, and today I started translating the talk.  There is no way that I can ad lib in Japanese so this is going to be my most prepared talk I have given since I stopped doing public speaking competitions!

会議のTシャツでできる10の事。

私は今までにYAPCの二十の会議に出席してきました。ですから会議のTシャツが山のようにあります。今からお話するのは、そのTシャツを私がどうしたかについてです。

The tickets for this year’s YAPC::Asia have just gone on sale.  The conference will held in Tokyo on the 15th and 16th of October with pre-conference events on the 14th.  The theme is “Welcome Perl”, and the guests speakers are Larry Wall, Jesse Vincent, and Miyagawa Tatsuhiko.

Most of the Perl grassroots conferences use the ACT system for running their events, but this year YAPC::Asia has decided not to use it.  I don’t know why they made this decision but I am missing the functionality.  I like seeing who else has registered for a conference and even though I don’t think that the ACT wiki is great, it’s certainly better than no wiki.

One of the reasons I’m writing this post it to let a friend know when the conference is running, as he hadn’t been able to work that out from the web-site.  The information is there but you have to scroll down to find it, when you expect the dates to be somewhere near the top of the page.

For the past couple of years YAPC::Asia has been the most attended YAPC and it could sell out, so I know that it’s important to buy tickets as soon as possible.  The ticket for both days costs only 4,000 円 ($47, £30), but speakers don’t have to pay and I don’t know if I will submit a talk or not.  Last night I began to submit a lightning talk but I had problems with translation and decided to give myself a bit more time to to think about it.  The concept of speaking in Japanese fills me with dread, but I’m not sure it’s anymore dread than I usually feel at the thought of speaking, so I may well give it a go.