Conference Surveys

London Perl Workshop 2012 - Survey Results

Introduction

The following survey results are a simple presentation of the raw data. No attempt has been made to analyse the data and compare with previous years. See forthcoming PDFs for more in depth analysis.

Click on pie charts to view larger image version.

Demographics

These questions will help us understand who our attendees are.

Attendees:

Age Band:

Job Type:

If your position covers many roles, please base this on your most senior responsibility. Also base this on the role you perform, rather than your job title. For example, a 'QA Developer' would be a 'Developer' role, and 'Information Manager' would a Manager role (Technical or Non-Technical depending upon your responsibilites)

If 'Other' please enter your professional job role or title:

• Sales Assistant
• Support Developer

Industry:

If you or your company undertake work within mulitple industry sectors, please select the primary one you are currently working within.

If 'Other' please enter your industry sector:

• Recruitment
• Security
• STM publishing

Region:

Please note this is the region you were a resident in, prior to attending the conference.

The Perl Community, YAPCs & Workshops

These questions are designed to help us understand our attendees level of involvement in the Perl community.

How do you rate your Perl knowledge?

How many previous Perl Workshops have you attended?

The following matrix lists, for each workshop, how many times an attendee has attended a particular workshop, with the total number of appearances of each.

Do you plan to attend a future YAPC/Workshop?

If no, could you tell us why?

Particularly if this is your first dedicated Perl event, we would like to understand why you would not be able or interested in attending another event like it.

• - no responses -

Are you a member of a local Perl Mongers user group?

If not, do you plan to find one or start one?

What other areas of the Perl Community do you contribute to?

If 'Other' please enter your area of contribution

• Distribution packager (Debian) of perl and related modules
• Gentoo Perl group
• I contribute to the Perl Community OUTSIDE the Perl Community (!)
• I run a perlmongers group
• I speak at Perl events (YAPCs, Workshops, technical meetings)
• Perl training for new employees
• shaking the french Perl community
• Southampton.pm
• Volunteer at perl events and EPO
• Wrote a review of a CPAN module and submitted bug reports for another

London Perl Workshop 2012

Regarding London Perl Workshop 2012 specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

These questions are used to try and identify areas of the conference that did and didn't work, with the aim of giving future organisers an opportunity to improve on all aspects of the conferences experience.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

If 'Other', when did you decide?

• after hearing about it from colleagues
• after reading a tweet
• After YAPC::EU 2012 Frankfurt, where some friends told me they'd go
• Discussion at PM
• hearing about it at YAPC Frankfurt
• I was in London
• I'm a sponsor
• London.pm
• london.pm irc channel

Were you a speaker?

Note that "similar conferences" includes other Workshops and YAPCs, as well as Linux, Open Source or large technical events.

If you were a speaker, would you have been able to attend if you hadn't been speaking?

If you weren't a speaker, would you consider speaking at a future conference?

What was your motivation for coming?

If 'Other' please let us know your motivation for coming

• Always wanted to attend, but never found time
• geekscore++
• I'm a sponsor
• improve my perl knowledge
• refreshing skills
• to contribute
• to find out more about Perl
• to find out more about what is currently happening within perl, particularly with 5.10+ advances
• to get more enthused about Perl.
• to learn
• To represent the company I work for, who were also a sponsor
• Volunteering

What aspects of the conference do you feel gave value for money?

If 'Other' please enter your suggestions

• and, the conference was free!
• Coffee & cupcakes! Also O'Reilly stand with big markdowns on price.
• Free beer!
• high quality
• it was free
• The volunteers

Did you have holiday planned around your workshop attendance?

Were there any talks you wanted to see, but missed due to clashes in the schedule?

If 'Yes', which talks did you miss?

There are always conflicts in the schedule, as it's difficult to know what everyone would like to see. However, if you could list a few talks that you missed, it would give speakers an idea whether it would be worth updating their talks for furture events.

Additional comments:

• Due to clashes in my personal schedule I was unable to attend the afternoon talks.
• This is really just testament to the quality of the event. I'd rather miss good talks than only have bad talks to choose from
• Lots, eg. Bytemark talk.
• many
• Many. Because I was caught in 1:1 talks after my talk. But that's probably a good thing. ;-)
• My background is in other languages, so if they hadn't clashed, I would have gone to both Learning Perl Together and OO with Moose. I was happy with the choice I made though (OO with Moose) - I have done enough Perl already to follow it. Learning Perl may have been too basic.
• Plenty as usual, but happy enough with trade-off generally
• Pretty much everything. I was talking for far too long.
• Unfortunately I was only able to attend the morning talks, as I was then told a parent had gone into hospital that morning and I left.
• The workshops, due to the talks being at the same time

There are always conflicts in the schedule, as it's difficult to know what everyone would like to see. However, if you could list a few talks that you missed, it would give speakers an idea whether it would be worth updating their talks for furture events.

Were there any speakers not present, who you would like to have seen at the conference?

If 'Yes', which speakers?

Additional comments:

• Damien Convey. I love listening to him.
• Leo Lapworth presenting Plack/PSGI.
• The schedule was just fine, but I would have been delighted to have heard Larry, Damian, mjd, merlyn, Tom Christiansen (if he 'does' public speaking of course), if we could have got any of them to come over.

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future London Perl Workshops?

Are there any topics you would specifically like to see featured?

• A comparison of the major web frameworks, and which ones are suited to what uses.
• An intro to PSGI/Plack on a conceptual level would be quite good. Maybe a "Whither mod_perl?" could be interesting too.
• As there seemed to be a lot of talks around 'new modules' or 'new ways of doing things', I would like to see more talks explaining useful current functionality aimed at beginner/junior developers. (e.g Catalyst)
• Best practices of large high-loaded projects; reliable deployment; relational database versioning
• better streaming of levels to location, to save haveing to move around so much
• carton + pinto (or other DPAN options) Would love to hear a "real world" talk on CPAN from a CPAN authors perspective. How to start a CPAN module (Dist::Zilla, Module::Starter etc). Any CPAN conventions (eg. directory structure, splitting author tests), what all the extra files do (META, MANIFEST, blib etc) and ways to manage them. Seems to be a moving target
• Catalyst
• I loved Dave Cantrel's TDD talk and think there is benefit in more eng'y talks which solve some real problem.
• It was a shame to miss the TT talk. There was a lot of stuff that looked like it was Catalyst-related (DBIC etc.) but no specific 'all about Catalyst' talk - probably because there's too much to cover and everything fits into Cat anyway. But a beginners' Catalyst talk might be an idea for next time. And to be honest a beginners' mod_perl talk wouldn't hurt either!
• It's quite common for people to talk about cool things in other languages (both Piers Cawley and James Laver did this, probably others too) but both were more like quick surveys of other languages without going into much depth. I'd like to see more "... and here's how it's affected my perl programming" in such talks.
• More about testing/unit testing.
• Perl 6 CPAN
• Perl and SCMS
• Plack PSGI Front-end web development (HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, JQuery-UI) for coders. Intermediate knowledge and use of common modules used in industry.
• Scalability, code quality, hiring Perl developers, and unicode. I'm torn between beginner and advanced level talks - on the one hand I want beginners to feel welcome so we can grow the community, on the other hand beginner level talks are not much use to me. Tracks based on advanced-ness could help here.
• Stealing things from other technologies and bringing them to perl. Dealing with Web Scale.
• the less widely used core features and CPAN modules
• The most of the accent is done on web development. I would like anything but web development.

How do you rate the workshop?

How would you rate your overall satisfaction of the following areas of the workshop?

Key:
1 = Very Satisfied
2 = Somewhat satisfied
3 = Somewhat un-satisfied
4 = Very un-satisfied
5 = N/A

* Note that while the workshop has no attendance fee, your time and travel expenses aren't free :)