Dear readers,

This Sunday post is the last one before the new 2013 year begins. So, a beautiful chance to have an opportunity to list some results that we achieved during the year and share some plans for the next one.

This year we made a big and very brave step towards hosting YAPC::Europe in Kiev. We made a proposal to the YAPC::Europe Venue Committee after the announcement that there were no other groups to host the conference in 2013. On the one side, we had an experience with making smaller events in Kiev and the YAPC in Riga in recent years, on the other, we have failed …

Dear YAPC::Europe attendees and those who would like to come to Kiev in August 2013,

We are very happy to announce the launch of the conference site: yapc.eu/2013.

Together with that, I am correcting the week countdown counter: there's no week minus 34, and …

Tomorrow is the 25th birthday of Perl. The Perl programming language.

When I've first heard about it, it was named PERL, the spelling that now is a nice indicator of awareness in the row with Perl and perl. Honestly, I never thought of Perl as of a practical extracting and reporting language, I simply had no clue about which reports and which extractions were mentioned in that definition.

I have first seen the name of the language on the book covers in a book shop in my home town years ago. I cannot tell you when exactly, but it was definitely before 1998. At tha…

A few times every month someone asks me how is it to work at booking.com. People know that I worked there some time ago and they tend to gather more information about the company in which they are going to be interviewed for a position of a developer.

The dates before the 21 December 2012 are the best ones to stop thinking about the company where I spent 1.5 years. Although both booking.com and I are strongly related to the Perl programming language and its community, the text below the cut-line is not about any technical issue in Perl, but is about the way booking.com stops the contracts with their employees. I intentionally use the feature of MovableType that allows splitting the abstract and the body. So, please do not read further if you don't want to read things that are there.

Hi,

This week I didn't fix the countdown week counter but I think I will do it next time. This week Viacheslav (vti) was negotiating the contract with the venue, and I am happy to tell you that he managed to save a few thousand euros by reorganising the room configuration that was initially proposed. We did not lose any space, and we still have the big and nice concert hall, so no worries. Huge thanks to vti! We hope to sign the contract next week.

It is very likely that we will have no extra paid classes around the conference. But still, if you are reading t…

Dear attendees,

We are very close to signing the contract with the venue. There are a number of things we have to do before we finally sign it. So, please excuse us for doing that so long. We have to negotiate, for example, the place for catering, internet connectivity infrastructure, sound and media equipment, -- all that goes into the contract.

Today I will quote the site of our venue, The Ukrainian House (ukrdim.org.ua, UA). We will rent the following rooms.

Concert hall (782 m²). The room for hosting conce…

Dear Perl users,

Two weeks ago I mentioned a couple of activities that I found nice to have in the conference. Today I will tell about other things that we already tested during our previous events.

In 2009, at YAPC::Russia in Moscow Alex Kapranov hosted the Game of the Future, where we were trying to predict the future of Perl and related things. There were a few grou…