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Last week I was in Pisa for YAPC::Europe 2010. Although I was doing a talk about CPAN Testers, my intention was to keep a low profile and observe more. Having run the conference surveys for the past few years, it has been noticeable that the attendance has been changing. While there are new people coming along to YAPCs, the general average age is getting older. Marketing Perl to companies to encourage its use is one thing, but attracting people in general to the language is also important. The fact that for a notable number of attendees this is their first YAPC, probably means we are getting something right.

There were several European Perl Mongers that were noticeably absent this year. While some had posted apologies (mostly due to imminent baby arrivals it would seem!), others perhaps have moved on to other jobs, projects or languages, or their life means that they cannot commit to something like YAPC any more. While we miss them, it is a natural way for the community to evolve. It does give a chance for newcomers to become involved and this year I wanted to see who we are potentially going to see more of.

It seems we have quite a few people who are giving us, the Perl community, a fresh look and I think that the Perl community is rather healthy at the moment thanks to them. At least from a European perspective. YAPCs are an ideal chance for people to meet and discuss projects, which otherwise can take days or weeks via email and even IRC. Those new to projects can better introduce themselves and forge better communication channels with other project members, both during the conference and at the evening social events. I think it was Dave Rolsky who observed that the Europeans seemed more accustomed to putting down laptops and talking, rather than sitting in silence hacking away. There certainly seemed to be lots of discussion in hallways this year at least.

With all the fresh faces around, it's crossed my mind on several occasions, as to who is the old guard these days. There are several I could name who kind of fit the bill, and many of us have been around working on projects for quite a few years. Not necessarily hacking on perl itself, but certainly helping to build the Perl community. We have quite a vibrant community, one that I think is quite inclusive, supportive and appreciative. We have disagreements at times, but it's a community that seems to easily span age and experience barriers and is willing to learn from each other.

Keeping a low profile initially seemed to be working for me, that is right up until the afternoon of the last day. During the day, José had asked if I would help with his lightning talk, but not wanting to be part of any more talks, I respectfully declined. Little did I realise it was just a ruse, so he could say thank you to me for organising and running the YAPC Surveys. So much for not drawing attention to myself! After the Lightning Talks, brian d foy took centre stage to present the White Camel Awards. I was very pleased to see both Paul Fenwick and José Castro receive awards, and in fact was laughing at José as he realised one of the awards was going to him. However, José was almost in hysterics when he saw my reaction when I realised I was also receiving an award.

As I mentioned in my acceptance speech, I've never wanted an award for what I do. I do it because I want to, and because I love being part of this community. I had been asked before whether I would accept a White Camel Award, and I'd said no. Although I don't think the awards themselves are a bad thing, its just that I think others have been more deserving of them. I've been involved in many Perl projects over the years, and have largely hid behind them, as I've always felt the projects themselves are far more important than me. The fact that several people felt I needed to be acknowledged this year, regardless of my reluctance to receive the award, I guess means that sometimes I just have to accept that people would like to say thank you for the work I do. If like José, there was one person I should thank for introducing me to the Perl community, it would be Richard Clamp. It was Richard who gave me my first proper Perl job and persuaded me to go to a London Perl Mongers social.

Which sort of brings me to one of the projects I helped with last year, and I'm very pleased to see continuing this year. Introducing people to the Perl community is one aspect of the Send-A-Newbie programme. Edmund instigated the programme last year, and we managed to bring 3 people to YAPC, giving them a chance to experience the conference and the community. The hope was that they would use and benefit from the experience, and hopefully feel more empowered to contribute to the community. Then maybe be in the future, they might be able to attend future YAPCs. I was delighted to see Alan Haggai Alavi at this year's YAPC, and surprised to see him so soon. I was then even more impressed to hear what he has been doing to promote Perl in India, as this is exactly the kind of enthusiasm the Send-A-Newbie programme can benefit from too. I spoke briefly with Leon Timmermans, who was this year's attendee via the Send-A-Newbie programme, and again it seems we've found another deserving recipient.

With programmes like Send-A-Newbie, the Perl marketing efforts and the community in general, I'm very hopeful that we'll be seeing more young blood in the community in the years to come. However, it still needs some effort from every one of us to ensure that happens. Which brings me to my next post in this short series, which I'll be posting soon.

I've now been in the community for over 10 years, with Birmingham Perl Mongers celebrating their 10th birthday in September. I'm guess that means I'm one of the old guard now, which isn't bad for a C programmer who had a lot to learn all those years ago. I feel I've come a long way in the last 10 years, and it's been a fantastic journey. Perl and the community have changed immensely in those years, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the young blood and fresh faces now, take us in new and interesting directions over the next 10 years and more.

Cross-posted from "Growing Up"

This year six of our fellow mongers managed to attend to the YAPC::EU in Pisa, constituting the 6th-largest perl mongers delegation at the conference. Every one of us also managed to get a room in the conference hotel, so it was a very comfortable event for us all.

While the authors can't speak for all Erlangen.pm members, it seemed to be a very good conference, with lots of interesting talks, nice social events and a good many meetings in real life.

Some of the talks that kept in mind were the one by Tim Bounce about his Devel::NYTProf and the one about CPANTesters by Barbie. The latter one showes the importance of Kwalitii to the Perl community and an ambisious project to enable quality assurance in CPAN, which is said to have lots of crap in it. Jonathan Worthington impressed with a talk about Perl 6 signatures, which others praised too.

Another important thing of the conference was what companies attended to the companies. Back at my own work when I told about the people who work at New York Times, BBC or Booking.com, my co-workers seemed quite impressed and drawn to say, that the impression of Perl as a dead language is far from reality.

@Larry also attended to the conference. He auctioned a tshirt for 450€ with the help of the community. He was accompanied by his wife Gloria, his son Aaaron, and Aaron's girlfriend Nicole. Dispite being no technican at all, but rather a teacher, Nicole held an important lightning talk about technical documentation, and how easy it is to write clear and easily understandable texts even about complicated technical matters by following simple rules like shortening long sentences to easy comprehandable smaller parts. But to that we are getting later ^^.

We're looking forward to next year's YAPC in Riga.

At YAPC::EU 2010, amongst all the talks I've attended and people I've met, I also gave a talk myself.

The talk was titled "When Perl Met Android" and discussed the Android operating system for mobile devices and the SL4A project and how to use it to run Perl on your phone.

You can find the slides right here. Hopefully I'll be able to cut the screencast to parts and upload to youtube or presentingperl.org - or both. Once that happens, I'll post links here as well.

The ideas to give the talk at YAPC::EU 2010 (which was also my first YAPC ever) and to participate in the SL4A project itself - promoting Perl - were both conceived by Gabor Szabo, to whom I owe quite a lot.

This is a good chance to say "thank you". Gabor has supported me with talks in multiple PM groups. He was the one who got me interested in SL4A (when it was originally called ASE) and pushed me to go to YAPC::EU and even give a talk there. He also supported me throughout YAPC::EU, which was quite intimidating for me at first.

My hat's off to him.

Thank you.

This year, on behalf of Perl mongers and O'Reilly Media, I present the White Camel Awards at YAPC::EU in Pisa.

The White Camel Awards recognize significant, but non-technical, achievement in the Perl community, traditionally in three areas: Perl advocacy, Perl user groups, and Perl community. Non-technical work tends not only to be thankless jobs which nobody praises in public. However, these people keep doing the work despite the possibility or reward or recognition. Curiously, the awards tend to go to people who don't think that they deserve them. Sometimes we have to force the award on people, which makes them the ideal candidates for them.

But that's okay, because we're not completely here to reward the person. Giving the White Camel Award gives us a chance to show the world that there are things that we value in the Perl community. This year's recipients, as well as their projects, have been deserving of this sort of recognition for a long time.

Perl User Groups: José Castro (cog)

José is seemingly ever present in support of Perl events in Portugal. He's helped to organize user groups as well as YAPCs and workshops. Besides supporting events in his own country, he's a constant help for other events and groups, and for he even maintained parts of the original Perl mongers.

Perl Advocacy: Paul Fenwick

Paul Fenwick is a tireless supporter of Perl and spends quite a bit of his time perfecting his speaking technique to draw large crowds for his Perl talk. Besides his many technical contributions, he works for Perl Training Australia, runs Perl Tips mailing list, and generally makes Perl fun and interesting to attract and educate new Perlers.

Perl Community: Barbie

Barbie is the glue that holds together CPAN Testers, the ad hoc group of people who download, test, and report on everything we upload to CPAN. Although there are a lot of technical aspects to making this work, creating and maintaining the community might be the hardest part of it. CPAN Testers success relies on attracting and retaining people who are interested in working with it.

Currently I'm located at the Dutch Eth0 Summer 2010 event, which is a camp-with-tents-and-attend-talks-and-workshops event. My younger brother who studies IT went with a bunch of classmates, and I decided to tag along.

So far it has been fun - I've done some Perl evangelising and handed out Round Tuits to random people (thanks for those Tuits, Wendy).

The overall view of Perl is the same ol' "Perl is line noise and the language hasn't seen changes in 10 years lol". While a rebuttal is easy, it's somewhat disheartening but not unexpected.

Other than that, not a bad tech festival.

I'm back from YAPC::EU::2010 in Pisa, Italy.

My 13th YAPC.

And it's still awesome.

I mostly enjoyed the lightning talks, as usual. They're funny and they're usually the bit of the conference during which I'm not busy writing slides.

Can't wait for the next one, in Riga, Lithu^WLatvia.

In the meantime, I decided to write on blogs.perl.org for a bit.

I was never much of a prolific blogger - and since I was out of action nearly a year back for an extended period, I have not managed to resume at all...

So I'm aiming to do a little perl blogging here, as opposed to on my other (mostly abandoned) blog. Hopefully this should manage to keep going for a while.

So... I've got this set of modules I've been going to opensource for more than a year now. Strangely, main obstacle is a choice of namespace.

Internally, they are called Stream::*. It is multi-layered set of classes with common interfaces, from low-level Stream::File / Stream::Log / Stream::MemoryStorage, to more complex Stream::Queue (local file-based queue supporting multiple parallel clients). Also, there are functional-style filters, catalog which can construct stream objects by their name, pumpers connecting input and output streams, multiplexing, and a lot of abstractions, base classes and roles...
Together, they assist in implementing complex asyncrohous, realtime and possibly distributed data processing.
By now, i think the paradigm I'm trying to implement is called a Flow-based programming, but until recently, I've mostly been thinking in terms of this image:

Anyway. I'll have a chance to talk about it later when this code will become public.

Any hints about namespace?
I don't like Stream::* that much, and there is a Stream-Reader in that namespace already.