I should really start to work on my travel plans for 2008. There are a number of conferences that I hope to attend as well as some family events I want to go to. At the minute I am planning on attending the following:
After a conference I like to read blog reactions. I haven’t come across anything about my actual talk but I did come across a comment about myself. And I must admit that being called “utterly lovely” has made my week if not my month.
This year, for the first time since Belfast, I had to be at a YAPC conference for the opening. I couldn’t afford to be a late as I had an announcement to make just after it began. I was surprised by how stressful I found this and if I have to do it again I am going to find the conference venue the evening before the event. I was also shocked that it was just as stressful to make a short announcement as it is to give a talk or tutorial. I always feel fine once I start speaking - which is just as well or I would never agree to speak in public again.
I was announcing, on behalf of the YEF Venue Committee, that next year’s conference will be in Copenhagen.
José gave a lightening talk on the things he had learnt in Houston. This included interesting things like how to adjust the air conditioning in the dorm rooms using a screw driver and the fact that the city seemed to be teeming with cockroaches. I learnt a couple of things too. On the first day I managed to get bites on both my feet. It was pointed out to me that I shouldn’t wear open toed sandals in Houston. I managed to get mosquito bites and something else that I was told was probably a chigger bite. I hadn’t even heard of chiggers.
I was also able to get some advice on coping with heat and humidity. And I did meet one woman at the airport who had lived in Japan and continued carrying a parasol now she was living in Houston again. Though the picture below of Norwin and Marty shows why men shouldn’t carry one of these no matter how hot it is.
Having just come back from YAPC::NA I thought I would write up some of my observations on the difference between this conference and the European ones I’ve attended over the past few years. I haven’t been to an American YAPC since 2001 in Montreal.
1. They had a pre-conference dinner
This surprised me as I thought that the last thing the organisers of the conference wanted to do the night before was to go out and eat Mexican food. I did enjoy this. Well, the only part I didn’t enjoy was the strange singing Mexican who wailed a love song into my ear after dinner - but it was certainly a different experience.
2. They didn’t name the rooms after any of the sponsors
I’m not really sure why they didn’t do this as I know that they did have some really good support from sponsors. Maybe they thought it would make it harder for people to find the various rooms or maybe it just didn’t occur to them that this could be something that the sponsors might like.
3. The conference bag didn’t contain a pen or paper
I suppose I’m still old fashioned as I like to write things down during the conference. If I make notes using my laptop I can become distracted and end up reading my email instead of listening to the talk.
4. They didn’t print conference proceedings
There was a booklet produced that contained location information, the schedule, sponsor information and talk abstracts but this didn’t contain the same level of detail that the European ones do. Having been involved in organising a YAPC I know that getting slides or papers in advance from speakers is very difficult and that it is also quite expensive to have these printed out. I didn’t miss these.
5. The auction was held during the conference dinner
I really liked this. It made the auction much more relaxed and also it didn’t seem to run as long at the European ones. The only disadvantage I could see was that it was easier to just sit and chat and ignore the auction.
6. They held a silent auction
One of the dullest things about the European auction is the selling of multiple copies of books and t-shirts. At the American conference a lot of these items were sold during the dinner via a silent auction. This still seemed to raise quite a bit of money and no-one had to sit through the tedium that usually goes along with this.
7. They held a “Town Hall” at the end of the conference
This was a meeting that allowed attendees to ask questions of the conference organisers and The Perl Foundation. I didn’t really like this as it didn’t end the conference on a positive note. The meeting went on for quite some time and people just started to drift away. I left before the end as I became much too cold in the air conditioned room.
8. They had a job fair
I know that in Birmingham last year that they had an expo / job fair but I haven’t quite gotten used to this idea yet. I did spend some time chatting to the various companies at the job fair as I was curious about their use of Perl even though I wouldn’t really be a suitable job candidate for them.
9. They didn’t announce the venue of the next conference.
At the end of a European YAPC they announce where the next conference is going to be held. This is a really positive way to end a conference and I thought it was a pity that they didn’t do this in America - though I don’t believe that the next venue has been chosen yet.
I realised today that it’s less than a month before YAPC::NA. It’s strange but I don’t feel in anyway connected to the conference. This could be because there is no associated blog. As there is no feed to let me know when anything has been announced I end up just forgetting about the whole thing entirely. And when I go to the actual site and the first thing listed in “what’s new” is “site updated” I really don’t feel any the wiser. I also didn’t receive an email when my talk was accepted. It seems that you were supposed to find out by looking at the conference schedule on the web-site. I wasn’t expecting this and I’m still a bit surprised that I haven’t heard anything regarding slides or written materials.
I have also found their wiki hard to use as I haven’t been able to find a way to search it. Maybe there is a way but it isn’t obvious to me. I also only found out that they have a mailing list because one of my friends mentioned it to me in passing. I couldn’t find anything about this list on the conference web-site. I did subscribe to the mailing list today as I took the time to look for it in google. Reading through the archives for the past month I discovered that Damian Conway has had to cancel. I was really looking forward to seeing him in Houston.
This is the first American YAPC conference I’ve been to since 2001 and I feel as if there are lots of things I would know if I had been to more recent conferences.
I’ve been reading the comments on Jono’s post regarding discrimination and a couple of them are asking for actual examples of sexual discrimination in their communities. I’m a member of the Perl community and I was trying to remember if I’ve ever had a problem with sexual discrimination. My first thought was that I haven’t at all. And then I occurred to me that maybe once, and I mean once in seven years, that assumptions were made because of my sex.
I went to register for a YAPC conference I was speaking at. The person in front of me was also a speaker and during the registration process he was given a ticket to the speaker’s dinner. I wasn’t given one when I was registering so I asked if I could have one. The person who was doing the registration looked at me and said “Oh I thought your husband was the speaker”. When I said that actually it was me that was speaking and not Marty I was given a ticket to the speaker’s dinner.
This did annoy me and made me rant a bit at the time but it’s the only personal example I can think of. Any other problems I can think of really can be explained by the fact that in any group of people there are going to be some that don’t like each other. It’s nothing to do with sex and everything to do with personality clashes and differing opinions. I really do think that sexual discrimination is low down on the list of things that are causing problems in the Perl community.
Marty was concerned about speaking at YAPC::Asia this year as last year both his talks were too short. This must have been a one off thing though as this year, true to form, he ran over. He spoke about three things that he considers to be the main culprits for making Perl code ugly and hard to maintain: variables; regular expressions; and object orientation.
The audience responded well to his talk and I was surprised that they even clapped at one of his jokes. The part that I liked best was his use of an acronym for Perl Object Orientation. He went on at length about POO! Hopefully he will decide to do some work on this talk and give it at one of the other conferences this year.
Marty and I are giving our first joint talk which could well turn out to be a disaster. At the time of submission this sounded like a great idea. Marty knows that I pay more attention to detail than him so the talk should have structure and I know that Marty should be able to keep the audience entertained and if all else fails talk for an hour about something.
When I mentioned YAPC this morning he said, “What are we planning on talking about again?”. (See, I pay more attention to detail: I know the talk’s about CPAN). This surprised me as I have already sent him a talk outline and can remember having discussions about the content of this talk. He laughed and said, “Well I’m not sure I actually read the outline; I just thought you wanted me to format it” (yes he actually said the semi-colon). And in relation to the conversations he said, “Was that when I was watching that episode of South Park…”.
I went to see Marty give his two talks today at YAPC::Asia. Normally I don’t go to hear him but I was curious to see what sort of reaction he would get from the Japanese. Would they laugh at his jokes, would they understand his accent, would they think he was mad?
The first talk was about using Template::Toolkit for non-web applications. This talk seemed to be liked well enough and he did get some interaction from the audience - although this mainly came from Ingy. The surprising thing was that he was finished early. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Marty finish a talk within his allocated time slot. It confused him. He thought that he had forgotten some examples or was missing some of the slides.
The second talk was the one he was worried about. The talk is called Kongougo and describes the features of Perl 6 that Marty believes Larry got from Ruby and the Japanese language. This is mostly a humorous talk and he was really worried that none of the audience would understand the joke. But he did re-write a lot of slides in Japanese and the audience really seemed to like it. The audience didn’t laugh as much as the European audience who had seen it but they clapped more. The Japanese will clap during a talk if you say something they really like. But, just like the first talk, this was also too short. And again Marty was really surprised.
My theory for this was that Marty wasn’t able to digress as much as he usually does as he was concerned that the audience wouldn’t be able to understand him. Miyagawa believed it was because the Japanese audience is more polite than a European one and that Marty builds lots of time into his talks to cope with the interruptions and heckling he usually gets from the audience.
Whatever the reason for this strange phenomenon Marty wasn’t the only one affected. Damian also finished his talks within his time slots and that is nothing short of a miracle.
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