The Friends and Family program is going to happens at 2010 YAPC::Europe as well: people coming with you geeks at the conference will have the chance to visit Pisa and surroundings with a guide, without the need to hang out on their lonesome or (worst) to stay at the conference.
We have a variety of choices for the program, and we need your help to decide: click here to take our survey and tell us what you would like to do/see!
THANKS!
This was the year of the comeback to YAPC::EU for me, after the only one I attended to in 2000 (or, better, in 19100) in London. Since I'll be one of the organizers of next year conference in Pisa, I thought I should really go and take a look (joking, I was going to be there anyhow).
By the way, Pisa was chosen for the 2010 of the YAPC::EU, that is to say I and other (mostly Italian) Perl enthusiasts will organize it. It's a bit scary when I think about it, but it's also an exciting challenge and I'm confident we'll be able to work well. We'll have to make ourself ridiculous enough by performing a part of the Rocky Horror Picture Show just before the Pisa YAPC... this is really scary.
The conference
The YAPC was, put it simple, a great conference. Most of the talks were interesting and enjoyable, with so many important speakers: you can have a look at the conference web site to see who they were.
My favourite talks were the ones related to functional programming (if I only had the time to dig this a bit more...), Moose, Devel::Declare, perl 6 regular expressions, and some other topic I can't remeber right now. I was also quite interested in the Padre editor, even though I'm not using it (yet?): having a good software in this are written in Perl could help the language to be seen as a viable option for areas such as GUI programming - moreover, Padre works well.
As expected, it was very nice and interesting to talk with people around the conference, see "old friends" (including the Italian folks I don't meet that often, after all), meet new ones, speak with the conference sponsors. It was especially nice to meet Dirk from Vlaanderen.pm again (after the London Perl Workshop 2008) and to know about Belgian Perl Workshop 2010, an event I unfortunately missed in 2009.
Coffee breaks were great, with file local pastries to choose from; the only thing I can say about that is that the coffee wasn't spectacular(as the one we use to serve at Italian Perl Workshop ;-). Lunches were good as well, with pizza slices and sandwiches: for conferences, I like this "pick up something when you want and" style much better than something like "sit down at 12:30".
As usual I wasn't able to keep my wallet locked: I bought 5 books at O'Reilly table (including a Mercurial one I'll probably never user) and a Shadowcat YAPC-dedicated t-shirt at the auction: wicked design, by Mark Keating - great t-shirt!
Around the conference
Evenings are always an interesting part of these events, as they offer the ideal environment to speak about technical and not technical matters... and they give plenty of opportunities for food and drinks. :-)
First social evening was the pre-meeting. There was supposed to be some early registration process, but there wasn't (or we weren't able to find where it was being done ;-)). The place was a big Irish pub in the Oriente district, a nice and modern part of the town, albeit a bit windy. It was good to be in a place where to drink beers which were more interesting than the local lagers. Too bad a conference attendee sitting next to me (I can't remember his name now) commented against my Talisker t-shirt: he liked Lagavulin better. :-)
The attendees dinner was in downtown Lisbon, in a waterfront restaurant, and it all revolved around very good meat... and also around caiprinhas, which were barely drinkable to say it all. I really have to mention the British-Italian quiz show team (osfameron and polettix), which achieved an honourable second place at the quiz show (hosted by Damian Conway).
I was also invited, as an organizer of next year's YAPC, at the speakers dinner, which was just nearby the Irish pub of the pre-meeting. Good meat to eat there as well. At the end of all of this, I have to say that Portuguese food is quite heavy as far as calories are concerned, but very tasty.
Lisbon
The city was a pleasant surprise for me. I decided not to sleep at the hotel suggested by the conference organizers, which was near the conference but a bit far from the downtown, and chose an hostel (Lisbon Poets Hostel) in Chiado. It proved to be a nice choice, as it allowed me to take a look at the city centre when going to and coming back from the conference or evening meetings.
The hostel had free Wifi, so I could keep in touch and even work a bit. As usual I chose to sleep in a dormitory (4 beds), which is a good way to save some money and to meet people. This time, however, I shared the room with 3 French girls and we didn't catch that much; oh well, no problem.
I had the chance to wander around the city centre and found it to be enjoyable: trams, small alleys, and fine buildings make it a very enjoyable place - and there are really a lot of people around. I also took a night bar crawl in the Bairro Alto with some people at the hostel: it lasted until 5AM and we drank way too many beers. The Bairro is a nice place however: everybody's friend of everybody and it's very easy to meet new people.
Da oggi sono ufficialmente aperti iscrizioni e call for paper per l'edizione 2009 (la 5a) dell'Italian Perl Workshop. L'evento si terrà a Pisa, presso l'Area di Ricerca del CNR, che è sponsor di questa edizione dell'evento.
Lo scorso anno si sono registrati numeri piuttosto interessanti per un workshop: oltre 30 talk (2 tracce per 2 giorni), 120 partecipanti, 20 sponsor, ospiti internazionali del calibro di Marcus Ramberg, Matt Trout, Tim Bunce e Rafael Garcia Suarez.
Quest'anno si punta a fare ancora meglio. Pertanto, il mio suggerimento è di non mancare assolutamente. Cliccate qui per visitare il sito del workshop
I attended London Perl Workshop for the first time this year: London is quite easy and inexpensive to reach from the Venice, Italy area where I live, so it made a lot of sense to me to go there for a few reasons: the list of talks was impressive; I wanted to give a lightning talk about the Italian Perl Community; I was keen to to know if they were doing better than we did at the Italian Perl Workshop. :-)
The workshop was held on Saturday, so I decided to stay the entire week-end: even though I visited London a lot of times in the past, there's always something to see and do there. The event took place at the New Cavendish Campus of the University of Westminster, which is a quite central location, just opposite the British Telecom tower (one of London skyline's main fixtures) and conveniently near Great Portland Street tube station. Once I got there, I realized what the organizers already stated: the organization was quite basic. The was no real registration process, but just a list where to tick your name and a girl giving out badges - which is more than enough, anyway. There was no wi-fi access (there were networks, but they belonged to University of Westminster and required login credentials we didn't have), but since I didn't even bring my laptop to the UK it was hardly a problem. And, hey, attending the workshop was free of charge.
The conference was split in four tracks, and therefore in four rooms: the biggest one was quite nice, holding approximately 250 people and with quite comfortable seats; also the second one was big enough, while the other two were actually classrooms and therefore smaller. This was actually fine, as one of these last 2 was used for 3-hours tutorials (so it was far from being full) and the other one was for supposedly more specialist talks, even though it was very full at times.
The workshop kicked off with a talk about London.pm given out by its historical leader, Dave Cross: that was very fun and entertaining! Next I followed an introduction to 10 CPAN modules by Leon Brocard, and I found there are really some modules which would be useful for me and of which I didn't know about (I've always been sure of that, CPAN is so huge...). The two talks by Matt Trout I listened to were among my favourites: he's very passionate in his explanation, no matter whether he speaks about something useful (see DBIx::Class+Postgres) or about something which is almost just a mental exercise (such see Acme::Yorkshire).
Mike Whitaker give out two talks about Moose, one basic and one intermediate: it was really nice to hear some details about such a great object oriented framework - Mike get ready, we'll try to bring you to Italy for our workshop. :-) Andy Wardley's talk was about Badger, a toolkit which can be seen as sort of "lightweight Moose" and upon which Andy built many modules which abstract a lot of functionality provided by Perl and by other modules; also Template Toolkit 3, a product of Andy himself, is Badger-based and should be soon on CPAN (I can't wait, I'm an avid TT2 user). Hakim Cassimally's Functional Pearls was the greatest last talk a workshop could have had: if you've never heard about programmable semicolons, well take a look. One of the lightning talks was pure genius: David Leadbeater created a Wikipedia summary system which had a method of querying it using DNS TEXT records (think about caching for free...)!!
All in all, the workshop was great. As you might have already guessed, the mean level was quite high, with some impressive peaks. Even though there were 4 tracks, there was not a basic one to speak of, which makes the workshop very interesting for Perl programmers but, of course, a little less appealing for folks trying to learn the language. After all this food for thought, there was a need for food for the body (not to mention beer), and here came a big surprise: the workshop organization reserved an entire pub and food and beers were served free of charge for all the evening! Speaking with Mark Keating, one of the organization leaders, it turned out he wanted people to finally associate free software with free beer, not the opposite as we've always learned. What a great idea!!!
So, for all of this I would like to thank all London.pm and other Perl Mongers who organized this event, and all the sponsors who made this possible (click here to see who they are).
It looks like we'll have at least 4 international speakers at this year's Italian Perl Workshop:
Of course, besides these names, there are also many great Italian speakers. You can take a look at the workshop schedule.
So, don't miss Italian Perl Workshop 2008!!!
After a year-lasting pause, Italian Perl Mongers are glad to announce a new edition of The Perl Workshop. As usual, the workshop will be held in Pisa. It will take place at the end of the Summer, on September 18 and 19.
Workshop attendance is free of charge.
We're looking for people interested in speaking at the workshop, or simply for talk ideas. Of course, we're also looking for people who just come to listen to the speakers:
This is the official web site, with CFP and other information:
