Last week I went to YAPC::Asia in Tokyo. One of the many good things about this conference is the amount of blogging that happens around it, but I have been finding it difficult to think of anything to write. This was the seventh YAPC::Asia that I have attended and the conferences have been incredibly consistent. Having a core group of people who are involved in the conference every year does mean that some things just work. The registration is efficient, the signs are wonderful, and the talk schedule runs like clockwork.

There were a number of things that I really liked. This conference, like the other YAPC conferences, is very cheap to attend. My “two day pass with t-shirt” cost me 5,000 円 (40 GBP, 64 USD). But it was also possible to become an individual sponsor of the conference by buying a ticket that started at 10,000 円 (79 GBP, 127 USD). I think that this is a great way to show support and help with the conference costs. These sponsors also received a special t-shirt and a conference mug.

YAPC::Asia Individual Sponsor T-shirt

The registration process was so well organised that having another category of people registering didn’t cause any problems.  Making everything look so easy has to be a combination of the experience of the organisers and also the fact that there were 43 people helping out with this conference.  I know that when I was involved in running a European conference that we maybe had 10 people volunteering during the event.  Mind you, this YAPC in Asia was a much bigger event with 798 attendees.

There was also a professional photographer at the event.  This means that there are now good quality photographs of all the speakers and of the general conference that are nice to have but can also be used in the creation of promotional material or to show future sponsors.

YAPC Day 1 - On Arrival at the Venue

It’s not the photographers fault that I was pulling silly faces early in the morning.

I do like that there are prizes for the top three talks.  I believe this year that the third prize was a set of books, the second prize was funding to attend three local Perl Monger events in Japan, and the first prize was funding to travel to either YAPC::NA or YAPC::EU.  The attendees of the conference use a web-based system to pick the best talks.

It was also the first time that I have seen a Lightning Talkathon.  My Japanese language skills are not good enough for me to have quite worked it out on my own.  I could see that a group of people were giving lightning talks but my first thought was that it was an area that allowed people to practice their talks before giving these before the entire conference.  It turned out to be a mini-conference running inside the main one where all the talks were lightning talks.  It was not as well attended as the main sessions but there were still a fair number of people involved and it is certainly an interesting concept.

Larry Wall was the opening keynote speaker, so I’ll finish with a quote from his talk:

There are many computer languages in the the world and they all they think they  are perfect.  With Perl 6 we are not trying to make it perfect, but right next to perfect, so the next generation can make it perfect. 

Larry Wall, Day 2

I have just bought a ticket to YAPC::Asia which is taking place in Tokyo from the 27th to the 29th of September.  I would suggest that if you want to attend that you buy your ticket as soon as possible.  Last year, I completely forget to do this and had to write to the organisers and ask for a ticket after the conference had sold out.  And since it sells out every year, I imagine that it will sell out this year too.

I have finally booked flights for my summer travel.  I start travelling next week and will be away from home for 14 out of the next 21 weeks.  I have booked 20 flights and plan to be in Seoul, Pittsburgh, Rome, Chicago, Madison, Amsterdam, Belfast, Frankfurt, London, Tallinn, and Sydney.  I’m a bit apprehensive about the amount of travel I’ll be doing, but I will get to catch up with a lot of people.  As well as a number of family events I’ll be attending YAPC::NA in Madison and YAPC::EU in Frankfurt.  I’ll also be back home in time to attend YAPC::Asia in Tokyo.  As always when I travel I will try to meet up with local Perl Mongers.

Attending and speaking at the Perl conferences is important to me but I haven’t managed to come up with an interesting talk this year.  I will be speaking about The Perl Foundation at YAPC::NA and I may do this as well at YAPC::EU.  But I had really wanted to create a lightning talk based around the number 25 as YAPC::EU will be my 25th YAPC and this year marks the 25th anniversary of Perl.  I still have time to get inspired, but I have so many Perl related things that I’m working on that I don’t know if I’ll manage to make the talk a priority.

Lestrrat wrote recently that “YAPC ain’t over until you blog about it“.   At the start of every conference I convince myself that I’ll write at least one blog post a day, but my plans often go awry.  I have started writing this post many times but keep stalling because I can only think of so many ways to say the word “great”.  It would be such a boring post if I just kept saying that everything was great, the registration process, the venue, the organisation, the speakers, but in reality all these things were great.

I will admit that I attended one conference this year where I didn’t actually register.  The queue was just so long and I knew that I could always come back and do it later, I just never got round to it.  But at YAPC::Asia the registration process was very efficient.  I arrived about 30 minutes before the start of the conference and it only took a few minutes for me to register.  I have been to the venue, so had no trouble finding out where to go, but there were beautiful signs at the entrance to the campus with a map to make it easy to find the main room.

I’m having difficulty in thinking of anything that was overlooked.  I’ve been to conferences that forgot to put up signs to let you know where the rooms were, that forgot to hand out wifi information, that didn’t print out the schedule because they assumed everyone would be online, but not at this conference.  I’m not saying that everything worked perfectly for them, as I remember that there were problems with the projectors on the first morning, but that everything was well thought out and any problems that did come up were handled well.  I received a printed copy of the schedule in my conference bag as well as details of the wifi and a map of the venue.  The main handout also contained useful information such as a section on how to get the most of the conference, bios of the keynote speakers, information on the IRC channels, and the tags to use on social media.

The conference had more attendees than any other YAPC, I believe about 670 of them, but it was only at the closing event that you noticed just how many people were there.  For the most part the venue easily coped with that number of people.  It also had more people helping out than I’ve even seen at a YAPC: 42 volunteers really did mean that there was someone around to handle any problem.

There were couple of quirky things about the venue.  The shutters in the main hall seemed to have a mind of their own and would occasionally pitch the room into darkness.   I did watch a few people stumble on the stairs in the dark.  The main hall  is also near the part of the university where musicians come to warm-up and practice. Not as a group, but as a bunch of individuals all trying to play brass instruments louder than each other.  This racket could occasionally be heard in the main hall, and was certainly noticeable when I was trying to work in the hallway, but I don’t think it caused much of a problem for the conference.

There are also some other differences from the YAPCs I attend in Europe and America.  This conference didn’t use the ACT system that is used by most of the grass-roots Perl conferences in the world. (Maki-san has written about his reasons for using something different.)  The only thing I missed about it is the ability to see who else is attending the conference.  I’m not great at remembering names and have often used ACT to go and look up a person after I’ve spoken to them in the hope that it will help me remember who I was talking to.

There was a professional photographer at the conference.  I quite liked this.  I know that lots of people carry cameras but it’s still nice to have a set of pictures of the speakers and the main events at the conference.

There were prizes for the top three speakers based on votes from the audience.  From memory I think that these were an ergonomic chair, an iPad, and a MacMini.  The keynotes speakers weren’t eligible to win, which makes sense, and I believe that a draw was taken and one of the voters also won a prize.

As for things I would change?  There weren’t that many talks in English this year, around 7 I believe.  I would like there to have been more but I know that since the conference is in Tokyo that the main language will be Japanese.  I also know that fewer foreigners are coming to Tokyo this year.  I would also have liked Larry Wall to have been there, I find it strange being at a YAPC without him.

I’m at the end of my post so finally my YAPC::Asia is over, and now I can prepare myself for the London Perl Workshop!

I noticed today that the call for papers for YAPC::Asia is open.  I need to decide if I am going to submit a talk. The conference is taking place in Tokyo, 13-15 October.  I will be at home in October so I plan to go even if I’m not going to speak.  I’m looking forward to hearing Ricardo Signes, who is one of the guest speakers. Actually one of things I like about YAPC::Asia is that I get to hear a lot more talks. When I’m at YAPC::NA or YAPC::EU there are a lot of people that I want to speak to and the hallway tracks are very beneficial to me. But I do a lot less chatting at YAPC::Asia and as a consequence go and hear more talks.

I only got round to submitting a talk for YAPC::EU last week.  I’m not very organised this year, but I have flights to Europe and I do plan to arrive in Riga a couple of days before the conference starts.  I really don’t want a repeat of last year’s travel disasters that meant I missed more than half the conference.

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.