Conference Surveys

YAPC::Europe 2008 - 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:

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

• + Consultant
• Fix-o-tron
• Freelance Translator
• Information Manager
• MScEE,BBA, consultant
• QA Engineer
• Senior Claims Advisor (Marine)
• Technical Director - hence tech manager -and- architect -and- developer -and- sometimes PM

Industry:

If 'Other' please enter your industry sector:

• all of them! this should be a multiple. OK, let's say it services, web, entertainment, telecommunications
• Bio Tech
• Bioinformatics
• Biotech
• chip industry
• Communication
• Fashion
• Insurance Broking
• Internet
• Marketing
• Selfemployed with different tasks in parallel
• Software Development
• Software/Virtualization

Region:

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

The Perl Community, YAPCs & Workshops

These questions will help us understand our attendees involvement in the Perl community.

How do you rate your Perl experience?

How many previous YAPCs have you attended?

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

Do you plan to attend a future YAPC/Workshop?

If 'No', could you tell us why?

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

• For some reason the (London) Workshops always clash with a previous engagement. I plan to attend one day, when it doesn't :)
• I was there as a sponser and participating at the jobfair. I'm not an IT guy, so the workshops are not for me.
• I would like to participate again, but most likely I would have to travel abroad and have my employer fund the trip.
• Let me answer on behalf of 5 persons I know who came to a Perl YAPC/Workshop, never to return again in such a conference. They were all Perl users. They all found that these conferences are, to a large extent, more for people working *on* Perl, rather than people working *with* Perl. The shock was such, that they simply didn't come back.

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

If 'No', do you plan to find one or start one?

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

• active member of Paris.PM
• comp.lang.perl.misc; #p5p/#perl
• contribute to our Perl Mongers site
• debian-perl group!
• freebsd ports
• http://perl-nachrichten.de, http://perl-magazin.de
• I am user of perl not currently a developer
• I blog about Perl
• I donate money, organize Perl workshops and Perl Mongers meetings
• I have a Perl blog
• I organize the Italian Perl Workshop
• I speak at conferences and organize a few (like next year's YAPC::EU O:-)
• I suck!
• IRC
• IRC! blog that sucks less than use.perl!
• newsgroups
• none
• organizer of Perl Workshop
• perl5 comitter
• TPF/YEF member

YAPC::Europe 2008

Regarding YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

• 4 months before
• After a friend told me YAPC::Europe::2007 was so cool :)
• After YAPC::2006, I knew I'd attend YAPC::EU again some time. I missed 2007, so here I was
• Company I work for would pay for the trip
• Member of Copenhagen.pm
• Have wanted to for a long time, but never really able to
• I live in Copenhagen
• I was asked to publish
• I was informed by my collegue who participated in the jobfair before
• Invitation
• Just felt like it
• Mailing list messages
• Nordic Perl Workshop
• Planned to attend another YAPC for years now.
• Recommended by a friend
• Recommended by DKUUG/SSLUG
• Saw that the timings were in line with my vacations
• Tried to go to YAPC since about 5 years. I manged it this year. Yeah!
• Wanted to see what it was like after going to YAPC::NA
• When I found out it was a local event
• when I had to cancel going to YAPC::Europe::2007
• When I learned it was going to be in Copenhagen
• When I saw I can do it
• When I saw it on the Interwebs
• When it was announced to be in Copenhagen
• When we became a sponsor
• Word of mouth

Were you a speaker?

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

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

What was your motivation for coming?

• Because I have attended all previous YAPC Europe
• Become part of the community
• Curiosity
• FUN in general, gathering new ideas
• Headhunting
• Learn something
• Negotiate about bugs & features with authors, and about other things I need and plan to do
• Tempting tutorials!
• The fact that it was local and cheap, good value for money
• The subjects covered by the talks
• To buy things at the auction and at the O'Reilly bookstand
• To participate at the jobfair
• To see other YAPCs
• To visit a YAPC "near" me
• Work paid for it and it's fun, plus and incidentally I get to meet other Perl hackers
• YAPC is just fun :)

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

• Bag? which bag?!?
• Beer
• BOFs
• Damian
• Larry / Damian
• Lunch
• Metro
• The attendees, the attendees, your great job as an organizer
• The catering / coffee / lunches
• The food
• The pre-conference meeting
• The Tattooed Widow
• Tutorials
• Which conference bag?

Did you have holiday planned around your conference attendance?

Were there any talks you want to see, but missed??

If 'Yes', which talks did you miss?

The following are based on the number of mentions each talk got in all the submitted comments.

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 they would be worth updating their talks for furture events.

Where there any speakers not present you were hoping would be at the conference?

If 'Yes', which speakers?

The following are based on the number of mentions each speaker got in all the submitted comments.

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

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

• - localisation and internationalisation
  - high performance computing
  - security
  - fast string matching
  - advanced regular expressions
• A beginner's track
  More serious talks
• A session for "Rookie Lightning Talks" and possible a 45 minute block with several 10 minute talks for first time speakers. Need a real beginner track, including the usual topics like how to build a module for CPAN. The speakers can change every year, but these simple topics should endure as they can be very important at the right point in a programmers life.
• Although I prefer expert level talks, I'd really like to see a beginner level track - not for me, I'll probably attend no matter which talks, but for attracting perl "novices" who feel scared to go at the moment.
• Beginners Track is a good idea, but as many attendees are experts it would be also nice to learn about teaching perl
  Best/Worst Practices
  Making CPAN modules - as there are now several ways to build one and META.yml is still developing, module-beginners need help with that
• Corporate Perl for next years YAPC::Europe sounds interesting.
• Distributed programming with perl tools
• Examples of big, real life applications composed from "mainstream" components (Catalyst, DBIx::Class, ...) - architectural decisions, naming conventions, ..
• Generating code during runtime. Emulating macros. Opcode hacking.
• I would like to see more experts making intermediate/expert level talks, rather than fun talks.
• I would prefer more in-depth talks instead of beginner talks - or in addition to!
• Interfacing with other programming languages.
• Introductions to other programming languages, from a Perl point of view.
• Mapping/Geospatial related?
• Mashups
• More advanced Web topics
• More functional programming
• more success stories, and less perl syntax talks
• More talks about testing
• MULDIS D
• Natural Language Processing, PDL
• None that spring to mind - a wide range of ideas usually get covered. Maybe a longer Ovid-testing presentation?
• OO - What are objects, classes, prototypes and how to use them
• Open Source Community Management
• Parellelization
  Computing clouds and clustering
• Perl use in system administration
  (I hope forthcoming YAPC in Lisbon, as being dubbed "Corporate Perl", may cover some of this),
  in the same vein, Perl use for Monitoring (like by Nagios/Munin, SNMP etc. plug-ins),
  Perl use in Engineering (does anyone do this at all? because I haven't found any modules on CPAN and once proposed to Adam Kennedy a name space like Eng or so)
  Perl use in Numerical Analysis (again, does anyone do this? probably number crunching requires compiled code anyway?)
  Perl use for (engineering, physics) Data Analysis,
  as well as for visualization (e.g. interpolation, approximation, curve fitting, line fairing, SVG)
  Perl for Webapps (I'm fed up of all the RAILs, J2EE, PHP Hype in this area and Perl has completely disappeared from the radar of web developers, and if still known is looked down at very condescendingly, thought of as not a proper programming language)
• perlguts, non-trivial xs, crazy things like Devel::Declare
• POE
  more on databases, rather than introductions to DBIx and such
• Practical approaches to:
  1. mod_parrot configuration and optimization
  2. mod_parrot/rakudo memory analysis and optimization
  3. mod_parrot/rakudo best practices
  4. conformity in the community about recommended standard approaches (patterns/best practices), and leaving going timtowdi, for those who have a special need only.
  5. enterprise standards for perl
  6. marketing perl, clean up perls appearance to the world
• Scalability and high volume web sites
• svn vs git, applications
• System Admin tracks
• templates - current alternatives + future directions
  web frameworks - ditto
• The announced topic "Corporate Perl" of the next YAPC will be very interesting!
• The topics featured were very interesting, it was a right mix of things. Hope to see more of such diversity next year.
• unusual use of perl (bioligy, simulations, AI ..)
• Using Catalyst or Jifty, OO design, more focus on practical stuff rather than theoretical/structural stuff
• XS

How do you rate the conference?

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

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

Would you like to expand on any strong views?

Show/Hide submitted comments

The Conference Fee

In order to help future organisers to gauge an appropriate conference fee, how much would you (or your company) have paid for a conference ticket? Feel free to provide an answer for all rates, where standard rate would be the price paid by your company, the individual rate for those in paid employment, but funding themselves, and lastly the student rate for anyone who holds proof (e.g. a recognised student card) that they are in current fulltime education, or have just completed their studies.

Standard Rate:

Individual Rate:

Student Rate:

How did you pay for the conference fee?