Planet YAPC

Posted at Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:24:00 -0000 | Permalink

At YAPC::EU, Salve was handing out baseball cards of Larry Wall to advertise NPW 2009 in Oslo. If you didn't get to see them, now you can:

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Posted by brian_d_foy on journal at Fri, 29 Aug 2008 17:48:34 -0000 | Permalink

at YAPC, this was one of the topics, people asked me about so will speak out here my truth about that subject.

at first: frankly I dont believe in competition, I really get easily outraged and I'm the person who don't like to spare with harsh words were appropriate.

That said, I'm pretty happy about Padre even I dislike the name, because it reminds me on stupid cargo cult religion through Rome. I like the effort because gabor gets things done and perl people deserve a good tool this or the other way and I already used some of his work to implement important feature in Kephra: an output panel, so you can run your scripts inside the editor. it will be inside the next, soon to be come testing release 0.3.10, 0.3.9.15 is already on CPAN.

But many people complain why so much duplicate work for 2 such similar projects. Yes their goals are very similar, even if I prefer different words to describe it, and the technology is almost the same (wxperl with scintilla and YAML::Tiny for config files). But the projects are different. I started 4 years ago and gabor some weeks. So he had naturally a difficult time to fit inside my grown project which he tried.

I believe the main differences are that gabor is much more pragmatic. He knows what tools he needs and goes the direct way to collect that. In order to that I consider him as a more heavyweight programmer than me, who still does not programming for living all the time and also still learning perl. I believe he can build up the long desired perl IDE in good software design and code quality, but I also believe there is more to it and that would much likely prefer to use Kephra over Padre.

We all use Perl and not Python because we are attracted to freedom and more the artist kind of way. And beside that, and why so many programmer try to write her own editor and if not use a higly customizable thing like vim, emacs or ultra edit? Because the editor is the most important tool for the programmer, its his living room which he like to decorate and arrange along his needs and likes.

because most editor prefer some ways to do it over others i started kephra, so that everybody could have (nearly) its own perfect editor. that was the primal goal. perl and the rest of it were a result of it. yes kephra was my first perl script. its rewritten several times and has still some crufty corners. (another point which may distract some people) but it has a way lot more feature than padre, a easy changeable keybinding, changeable menus, changeable commandlists and a extention API is currently building up.

yes we have UTF problems, linux problems and testing is still something im currently learning. (bought cromatics book at yapc). but these all high priority goals to me and up to now I always reached my high priority goals.

I have e designer in my team and try also to make thing beautiful, well engenered and that everything fits to the whole. that whats ment by the name kephra, which is egypt for heart which sits in the middle of the body and tries to connect everything to a larger entity.

so thats the way I see it. :)

Posted by sir_lichtkind on journal at Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:36:36 -0000 | Permalink

I have just received confirmation from DKUUG that our surplus from Nordic Perl Workshop 2007 will be transferred this forthcoming Monday to:

• The Perl Foundation (TPF)
• YAPC Europe Foundation (YEF)
• Foreningen Fri Software (FoFS)

It is not huge amounts, but hopefully it will do good in the three organizations.

The surplus was divided into 3 equal parts and for FoFs and YEF, we are paying back money we applied for (+some).

Posted by jonasbn on journal at Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:48:38 -0000 | Permalink

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Posted at Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:55:00 -0000 | Permalink

The subject is a bit odd, but I had been telling people that YAPC::EU in Copenhagen would be my first YAPC::EU. Then, as I was finishing my BackPAN Indexing talk (more on that later) and trying to get off stage so Dave Cross could set up for his Ye Complete History of Ye Perle Mongers of London Towne talk, I realized that I was at the first YAPC::EU, the one in London in 2000.

Copenhagen is then my second first YAPC::EU. It's a different crowd and culture, and the Perl world is a lot different. The first first YAPC::EU was right after Perl 6 was born and I was its spokesman and everyone thought we'd just crank it out and have it at the next OSCON. Also, being the first YAPC in Europe, and only a couple of years after the first YAPC in Pittsburgh, it was mostly the same people. The core Perl community was still exploding, and there wasn't a big difference between hanging out with Perl geeks in North America and hanging out with the same people in London.

My second first YAPC::EU started off much more nicely. In London I couldn't get into the conference site at first because police had it surrounded. Someone had shot a rocket at some government building or something. I don't even remember seeing any police in Copenhagen (although Adam Kennedy tells me that they are around at pub closing time). No one talks about police presence in the conference surveys though. Copenhagen is already ahead in points because I can get into the building, which is right next to a train stop, by the way.

It would be hard to tell the new YAPC::EU as a technology conference though. I don't even wake up until 10 am, so I get to the conference site around 11 am, and by that time half the conference day has gone by. Aren't these people programmers? How can they be up so early? I want to have about four hours of conference in the afternoon then hang out all night with people. I expect that in three or four years, conferences will start at sunrise (so let's not have them in Iceland in that case).

The conference was big. I don't recall the numbers, but it was hard to get around to talk to as many people as I liked. Part of this is that I can talk to a few people for quite a while, and we packed the dinner venue way past American fire codes would allow. The coolest part was Adam getting five of the PAUSE admins (myself, Adam, Steffen Müller, Andreas König, and José Castro) together for the YAPC dinner. I'd never met Andreas or Steffen, and it's always nice to meet people I work with. Indeed, we cleared up a couple of PAUSE admin things over dinner with a minimum of fuss and without protracted email threads.

That brings me to the biggest problem of YAPC::EU. Adam Kennedy, Ricardo Signes, Curtis "Ovid" Poe, and Jos Boumans are all there, and as I'm talking about BackPAN to people all week, they keep adding feature requests. They aren't really wish lists items, because they've all created most of the stuff I need to implement the feature and I just need to call the right module. Being at anything with Adam is dangerous because we've been going through tech life in almost parallel lines. We're both interested in things like automated release and build tools, and have independently created very similar things. If I have a problem, Adam has probably solved it and has a patch in some repository somewhere. And, every time I find a Perl version difference, he now wants me to add a test to Perl::MinimumVersion (which is insanely cool and twisted). To get anything done, stay away from these people.

If that's not bad enough, I met Paul Johnson, who created Devel::Cover, which is where I spend most of my time now. When I fix bugs, I now try to bring the modules up to 100% coverage in all columns. I've found that the best way to make code better, smaller, faster, or stronger is to do good-faith full coverage testing. It shakes out all the bad design (because that's hard to test), encourages refactoring (to avoid duplicate tests), and finds unreported bugs. Imagine that: testing is good. Now, imagine someone indexing every module ever uploaded to CPAN. While that someone is in there, might as well run the tests and index the test coverage too, right? And so, Paul led me to another big thing with BackPAN indexing: it has to happen with multiple Perl versions too. That's a really good idea, and it's easy. It just makes indexing take longer.

At the auction, José wanted people to decide the t-shirt design for YAPC::EU 2009 in Lisbon by voting with their euros. He'd warned me ahead of time that I should come up with a design, and I had to compete against Damian and BooK, who had no warning. I don't have a drawing, but Alberto made a modified version of my idea that looks really nice. It plays off the Portuguese flag and the seal of Portugal. It narrowly beat out a more flippant design for around €1400. That's a lot of money for a quick design, but If I'm going to travel the world to go to conferences, I want a t-shirt that shows off the local symbols Barcelona.pm has a shirt with La Sagrada Familia, which is slightly cooler than my take on the Chicago flag using the Perl sigils. Jon Rockway told me some Chicago cops were a bit miffed over my design thinking the line noise was some sort of protest statement, so maybe we can avoid that in Lisbon.

T-shirts were a big deal at this YAPC. BooK has been making custom shirts. I'd like to get catalog every Perl t-shirt ever created, and we talked about that briefly. I don't have any firm plans for that, but if you have a Perl shirt, take a picture of it and put it on flickr or something. Flickr already has several Perl tshirt pictures, and I've created a Perl Tshirt group. Nadim Khemir got his employer, Ericsson, to donate all sorts of swag (including free phones) and sports shirt. I certainly like the sports shirt since I usually only were logo-ed tshirts when I'm running, and now I have a Onion-logo running shirt that's actually a running shirt. I'd show a pic but it's actually in the wash right now.

BooK also has a conference database that I want to get into The Perl Review Community Calendar as a historical record. Take a look at the data. You might be surprised at the history. Do you know where the first Perl event was held? Or which country has had the most events? Some of the answers are surprising.

Salve Nilsson from Olso.pm announced that the next Nordic Perl Workshop would be in Oslo on April 16-17, 2009. I also got to meet Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason in Copenhagen, and Adam Kennedy, Joshua McAdams and I met up with him in Reykjavik the week after the conference. Remember when I mentioned an NPW in Iceland? I'm still trying to make that happen. We even went to the spot where Europe and North America meet and started a Perl program written with volcanic rocks.

There are a lot of other nice little things that happened at YAPC::EU and I'm looking forward to next year's in Lisbon.

Posted by brian_d_foy on journal at Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:42:52 -0000 | Permalink

Posted at Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:42:00 -0000 | Permalink

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 :)

Enjoy!

Posted by barbie on journal at Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:09:08 -0000 | Permalink

Posted by Каталог программиста at Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:56:00 -0600 | Permalink

Posted at Wed, 27 Aug 2008 20:57:00 +0100 | Permalink

Posted at Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:57:00 -0000 | Permalink

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.

Posted by jonasbn on journal at Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:18:05 -0000 | Permalink

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 :) On the plus side there were a few people I bumped into, that I was rather glad to have a chat to, including Marcel and Charles. It's one aspect of a YAPC that I like, being able to put a person to a name.

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 :)

Posted by barbie on journal at Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:05:55 -0000 | Permalink

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.

Posted by sir_lichtkind on journal at Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:17:33 -0000 | Permalink

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.

Posted by barbie on journal at Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:14:58 -0000 | Permalink

Posted by Philip Newton at Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:48:00 -0600 | Permalink

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

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