With the extra space, I've also been able to include the group shots that were taken at some of the events. Unfortunately there was no group shot taken in Birmingham, and I've not seen any during the 2010 and 2011 events, so if there are any, please let me know. Also if there is one of the Tokyo Satellite event this year I would love to include it on the site.
I've added some write-ups to the last few events in the About page. The biggest change though is likely only visible to those with screen readers, as I've made many changes to links and images to provide more accessibility. Several fixes to layout, spelling and wording have also been included too.
The site, particularly the list of reviews, is still incomplete. If a blog entry is missing that you think should be there, or you spot other items that could do with an update, feel free to email me with details, or fork the repo on GitHub and send me a pull request.
]]>Each year I try and update details in a timely fashion for the forthcoming QA Hackathon and often fail. BooK requested that I put the site files online, so that anyone can help to keep the site updated. I may not have the time to write the content, but it's not too bad to accept pull requests and update the site, so feel free to contribute.
Two areas in particular I would love to see content added is firstly with translations into non-English languages, and secondly to extend the content, particularly with writeups and links about previous QA Hackathons. I will have a look at structuring some of the previous content to make it a little easier to contribute both translations and new content, but please don't let this stop of contributing if you have something to add.
More updates from the 2013 QA Hackathon here in Lancaster soon :)
]]>Many thanks to the 124 respondents, who made up 37% of the attendees. Although we usually experience a greater response from European attendees, the responses we did get still give a reasonable picture of the attendees. Once again it seems the attendees are getting older with the average age of an attendee being in their mid-30s. For a good proportion of the respondents this was their first YAPC, so we are still encouraging newcomers to get more involved in Perl community events. With 327 attendees in total this was the 3rd highest attended European YAPC (only just behind Vienna (340) and Lisbon (330)).
While many of the attendees are from Europe, interestingly the numbers attending from the UK & Ireland are falling, at least for those responding. I'm inclined to believe this is true of the complete assembly, as many of the established Perl pioneers in the UK & Ireland now only occasionally attend YAPCs. We are seeing many more newer faces becoming the new established Perl pioneers from right across Europe. I originally singled out the UK & Ireland, because in the early days it was often where almost half of the attendees came from. In future surveys I may remove this option.
While there is much more promotion of the YAPC events now, it does seem that we are mostly still only reaching those within the Perl community. Most of those that attend either already attend the event, or saw the promotion on a Perl website. There are still a large number of potential attendees we're not reaching. Many are developers who program in Perl, who typically don't read Perl blogs and news sites, but they do read various Linux or tech related feeds. Promotion at FOSDEM and other similar inclusive tech events may also help to keep our numbers growing.
Some interesting topics suggestions for future speakers, and several that I would be interested in seeing. "Network and secuirty" and "monitoring and automatisation" were two suggestions that might also help to encourage those outside of the community currently. I've seen these topics covered at other technical (non-Perl) events, and they are always well attended, and I'm sure we would have the same level of interest with Perl related talks too.
The survey respondents rated the conference an overall success, although there were quite a few issues with the building. It was also noticeable that BOFs are getting less and less promotion. It was good that the conference day started at a reasonable time each day, but more time after the main talks would have been great to encourage people to organise BOFs. Its often were small projects can promote themselves and encourage new contributions. They can often flow over into evening events, and are a way for newcomers to introduce themselves gently into the community.
Thank you to all the attendees who took the time to respond to the survey, and all the talk evaluations, as it really does help to make these events better every year. If you plan to attend next year, and didn't respond to the survey this year, what you could have told us to make things even better? Even if you were happy with the event, positive encouragement is always welcome. These survey results are also used to encourage potential sponsors that the events are worthwhile, and that they will get a benefit from supporting the Perl community. Having an even higher level of response adds more weight to the message organisers are telling them.
Apologies for the delay in getting these results online, a combination of CPAN Testers, work and family have meant I wasn't able to get around to tidying up the results until recently.
Enjoy the results.
]]>While at YAPC::Europe this last week, I started tinkering, and fixing the URLs, regexes, logic and tests in my two distributions. Both distributions have had functionality removed, as the read-only site doesn't provide all the same features as the old dynamic site. The most obvious is that posting new journal entries is now disabled, but other lesser features not available are searching for comments based on thread id or users based on the user id. The majority of the main features are still there, and those that aren't I've used alternative methods to retrieve them where possible.
Although the distributions and modules are now working again, they're not perhaps as useful as they once were. As such, I will be looking to merge both distributions for a future release, and also providing support to a local database of the full archive from Léon.
Seeing as no-one else seems to have stepped forward and written similar modules for blogs.perl, I'm now thinking it might also be useful to take my use.perl modules and adapt them for blogs.perl. It might be a while before I finish them, but it'll be nice to have the ability to have many of the same features. I also note that blogs.perl.org also now has paging. Yeah \o/ :) This has been a feature that I have been wanting to see on the site since it started, so thanks to the guys for finding some tuits. There was a call at YAPC::Europe for people to help add even more functionality, so I look forward to seeing what delights we have in store next.
]]>Many thanks to the 165 respondents, who made up 37% of the attendees. Although the responses only feature a third of the attendees, they do appear to cover a complete mix of experience, and present a good cross-section of attendees. As has been observed in previous years the average age of the attendees is getting older. That's not to say we aren't bringing new people into the community and the conference circuit, but it seems that Perl is a language people are getting into enough to attend events like this from their late twenties. In 2012, YAPC::NA had it's biggest attendance so far, so Perl is definitely growing its community. Hopefully events like YAPC are encouraging more and more people to learn more about Perl and the community. Looking at the demographics of the respondents, it's not too surprising to see the popular job roles and industries listed. However, it is encouraging to see Perl is being used in many different industries.
The level of Perl knowledge of the respondents leans towards the more experienced, but there are still a healthy number of lesser experienced attendees, that make the 101 courses and talks a worthwhile addition to the schedule. The experience of attendees is also highlighted by the previous attendances at YAPCs and Workshops. One aspect that we have always tried to encouraged, is to introduce newcomers to the community, and keep them coming back to the various Perl events. Although location plays a big part for many first time attendees, we do seem to be encouraging some to get more involved.
With regards to promotion, JT's blog posts and general high profile advertising of YAPC::NA 2012, seems to have paid off. Aside from hosting the biggest attended YAPC::NA, several people got to hear of the event via the various posts. It was an ambitious task to post every day, but he managed it. While an event doesn't necessarily need a post every day, I would encourage future event organisers to regularly engage with their potential attendees. For some its way to see progress, and be reassured that an event is still happening, but for many others its a way for them to hear about your event. MST regularly tells people to promote their latest project, and in the same way a technical event is exactly the same. Promotion does work.
I always enjoy reading the suggested topics for future YAPCs, and again the respondents came up with some great ideas. One idea I picked up on, was "How to use CPAN modules". Having attended several talks about particular modules, there is perhaps a natural emphasis on how the module works, and why you might want to use it, but not necessarily how to use it. There always requests to hear real world examples of using modules or applications, so hopefully we can see more of those kinds of talks in the future. Perl is well known for providing the tools via CPAN, but we don't always talk about the success stories and how we used Perl/CPAN to get the job done.
Not too surprisingly the survey respondents rate the overall conference a success. Although there are some aspects that some felt didn't always work, many were beyond the control of the organisers. I'll be providing the full feedback to organisers in the coming weeks. I'll also be posting this to the future organisers, for them to digest and hopefully consider for their event, helping to make the whole conference experience better for everyone. I think the biggest positive from the event has been getting the videos online quickly after the event, as well being able to stream many of the talks live. This aspect for conference organisers can be a very expensive and/or time consuming task, so the more improvements we can make with this the better, as ultimately it helps yet again with the promotion of Perl, the community and events.
Thank you to all the attendees who took the time to respond to the survey, as well as all the talk evaluations, as it really does help to make these events better every year. If you plan to attend next year, and didn't respond to the survey this year, please think what you could have told us to make things even better. Even if you were happy with the event, positive encouragement is always welcome. These survey results are also used to encourage potential sponsors that the events are worthwhile, and that they will get a benefit from supporting the Perl community. Having an even higher level of response adds more weight to the message organisers are telling them.
Enjoy the results.
]]>Many thanks to all the attendees who submitted 566 individual talk evaluations. Having read through them all in order to ensure no unpleasantness appeared, I was quite impressed with some of the great comments. And not one had to be doctored either.
I am now working on the main survey results and hope to have those online by the end of the week.
]]>I've now updated the Birmingham.pm events page, to display the new calendar, as well as the West Midlands Tech Events calendar.
If you have access to any similar calendars, you can now update them with Perl (if you weren't already), with the aid of my helpful script. Feel free to use and abuse as you wish. Note that you will need to have a login to Google Calendars, and have access to the calendars you are submitting to.
]]>Unfortunately, the backup process ran last night and filled up the disk, as I hadn't gotten around to archiving the backups from past few weeks on to the main backup server. Many apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Rest assured, the automatic backup update has now moved higher up my priority list :)
]]>If you attended the YAPC::NA conference in Madison last month, and haven't already completed the surveys, please check your email for your personal keycode, and take a few minutes to complete the survey. It really does help to improve the event every year.
In addition, please take a few minutes to complete talk evaluations for those that you attended. The speakers put a lot of work into their presentations, preparing slides, researching their subject matter and working up the confidence to stand up in front of people who they don't know. Getting feedback those listening can really help them to improve their presentation skills for future events.
The surveys only take a few minutes of your time, but the feedback can help to improve the conference experience for everyone in the future.
If you haven't recieved an email from myself, first check your spam folder, and if you still can't find it, please contact me directly, and I'll let you know your personalised keycode.
To the 110 people who have already response, many thanks. It really is very much appreciated. To the 337 who haven't taken the survey, you still have until midnight Friday 6th July, so please help to make a difference.
]]>After asking several times, Andreas thought he finally understood what the dates mean on the Status page for the CPAN Testers Reports. He started watching and making page requests to see whether his requests were actioned. On Day 3 he pointed out that the date went backwards! Once he'd shown me, I understand now why the first date is confusing. And for anyone else who has been confused by it, you can blame Amazon. SimpleDB sucks. It's why the Metabase is moving to another NoSQL DB.
The date references the update date of the report as it entered the Metabase. The last processed report is the last report that was extracted from the Metabase and entered into the cpanstats DB. Unfortunately, SimpleDB has a broken concept of searching. It will return results before the date requested, and regularly return the sorted results in an unsorted order. As such the dates you see on the Status page may go backwards in time! I'm not going to try and fix this, as it will all work as intended with the new system.
There have been several questions relating to missing reports over the past few years. Sometimes it just needs me to refresh the indices, but in other cases it may be due to the fact that SimpleDB omits reports from a request. Did I mention SimpleDB sucks? In a request to the Metabase, I will ask for all the reports from a given date. The results are limited to 2500, due to Amazon's own restriction. In the returned list it will often omit entries, due to its ignorance of sorting in the search request. I have gone through the Metabase code on several occasions and can verify it does the right thing. SimpleDB just chooses to ignore the complete search request and returns what it *thinks* you want to know.
Ribasushi questioned me about one of his modules that had been released recently, which still had no Cygwin reports listed, even though he sent a few himself. Further investigation revealed that they are indeed missing from the cpanstats DB. Although they did enter the Metabase, they never came out again.
To resolve this I have been revisiting the Generator code to rework the reparse and regenerate code to enable search requests for missing periods, in the hope that this will retrieve most of the missing results. If it doesn't, then I will be asking David to produce a definitive list for me, and I will make specific requests for any missing reports. The Generator code has been updated in GitHub to include all the performance improvements that have been in live for some time too.
Every so often the parsing mechanism fails and stores the wrong data within the cpanstats DB. These days it seems to only affect the platform, OS version and OS name. I'm not quite sure what is happening, as reparsing the report locally again produces the correct results. This uses the same routine to parse the report, so why they occasional fail remains a mystery. However, to combat this, I now have a script that can run and search periodicly for this erroneous data and attempt to reparse the results. It can then alert me when it can't fix it and I can investigate manually. The have been occasions where the report can't be parsed due to the output being corrupted on the test machine, which unfortunately we can't always resolve. Sometimes there are enough clues within other parts of the report that point to a particular OS, but sometimes we just have to leave it blank.
It seems in putting some of this code live before leaving the hackthon, I accidentally reintroduced a bug. Slaven was quick to spot it and tell me about it, but unfortunately it was too late for me to fix it, as I needed to leave and catch my flight home. It should be fixed by the time you read this though, so all should be back to your regular viewing pleasure :) With the new script I've written, it should hopefully find and fix these errors in the future, as well as alerting me to fix the bug again!
So that was the 2012 QA Hackathon. The show ended with a group photo, although a few were missing due to their early departures home, but I think we got most of us in. Including Miyagawa, who was taking the picture. The traditional thanks yous and good byes ensued and then Andreas and I headed off to begin our adventure getting the airport! The next hackathon, the 2013 QA Hackathon, will be in London. We'll have the domain pointed to the right place just as soon as Andy gets the website up and running. I look forward to a lot more involvement for next year, as we have been steadily growing in numbers each year. There has already been some significant output, but the event is much more than that. It's a chance to take to people face to face, discuss ideas and plan for the future. Expect more news for CPAN Testers soon.
Once again I would like to thank ShadowCat Systems for getting me here, and for being a great supporter of the QA Hackthons, as well as many other Perl events over the years. Thanks too to Laurent Boivin (elbeho), Philippe Bruhat (BooK) and the French Perl Mongers for making the 2012 QA Hackathon happen. The Hackathon wouldn't have happened without the generosity of corporations and the communities that donate funds. So thank you to ... The City of Science and Industry, Diabolo.com, Dijkmat, DuckDuckGo, Dyn, Freeside Internet Services, Hedera Technology, Jaguar Network, Mongueurs de Perl, Shadowcat Systems Limited, SPLIO, TECLIB", Weborama, and $foo Magazine. We also have several individuals to thank too, who all made personal contributions to the event, so many thanks to Martin Evans, Mark Keating, Prakash Kailasa, Neil Bowers, 加藤 敦 (Ktat), Karen Pauley, Chad Davis, Franck Cuny, 近藤嘉雪, Tomohiro Hosaka, Syohei Yoshida, 牧 大輔 (lestrrat), and Laurent Boivin
Meanwhile, Dan & Ethne would also like to thank Booking.com for their silly putty ;)
Cross-posted from Memoirs of a Roadie
]]>This module was originally written in response to a question by Leo Lapworth about how the summary information is produced. As a consequence he wrote CPAN::Testers::WWW::Reports::Query::JSON, which takes the data from the stored JSON file. In most cases this data is sufficient, but the module requires parsing the JSON file which may be slow for distributions with a large number of reports. On the CPAN Testers Reports site, in the side panel on the distribution page, you will see the temperature graphs measuring the percentage of PASS, FAIL, NA and UNKNOWN reports a particular release has. This is glean from an AJAX call to the server.
But what if you don't want an HTML/Javascript styled response? What if you wanted the results in plain test or XML? Enter CPAN::Testers::WWW::Reports::Query::AJAX. Now you can use this to query the live data to for a particular distribution, and optionally a specific version, all the result values and get them pack as a simple hash to do with as you please.
I anticipate this might be most useful to project website who wish to display their latest results from CPAN Testers in some way. They can now get the data, and present it however they wish.
Now we get to perhaps the bigger module, even though its smaller than the one above. This module is perhaps most useful to all those who are trying to maintain a version of the cpanstats metadata from the SQLite database. As mentioned previously the SQLite database has been giving us grief over the past year, and we haven't gotten to the bottom of it. Andreas suspects there is some unusual textual data in some reports that is causing SQLite problems when it tries to store it. I'm not quite convinced by this, but as I'm only inserting records, I'm at a lost as to what else be the cause.
The SQLite file now clocks in at over 1GB compressed and over 8GB uncompressed, and is starting to take a notable amount of disk space (though considerably smaller than the 250GB+ Metabase database ;) ). It is also a significant bandwidth consumer each day, which can slow processing and page displays, as disk access is our limiting factor now.
Enter CPAN::Testers::WWW::Reports::Query::Reports. This module uses the same principles as the AJAX module above, but now accesses an new API on the CPAN Testers Reports site to enable consumers to get either a specific record or a whole range of report metadata records. Currently the maximum number of records that can be return in a single request is 2500, but this may be increased once the system has been proven to work well. Typically we have around 30,000 reports submitted each day, so to allow consumers to make best use of this API, I will look to increasing the limit to maybe 50,000 or 100,000. I want to impose a limit as I don't want accidental requests being sent to consume the full database in one go, as again this would put a strain on disk access.
The aim of the module is to allow those that currently consume the SQLite database, to more regularly request smaller updates and store the results in any database they so choose. Even into a NoSQL style database. It will ultimately reduce the bandwidth, data stored and processing to gzip and bzip2, which then means we can reallocate effort to more useful tasks.
If you currently consume the SQLite database, please take a look at this module and see how you can use it. I plan to include some example scripts that could be drop-in replacements for your current processes, but if you get there first, please feel free to submit them to me too, and I will include them with full credit. If you spot any issues or improvements, please also let me know.
This morning we had a CPAN Testers presentation and discussion hosted by David Golden. As there is plenty of interest from a variety of parties about CPAN Testers, it was a good opportunity to highlight an area that needs work, but which David and myself, as well as other key developers in the CPAN Tester community, just don't have time to do. Breno de Oliveira (garu or IRC) has very kindly stepped forward to look at one particular task, which we have been wanting to write since the QA Hackathon in Birmingham, back in 2009!
Breno has written a CPAN Testers client for cpanminus. At the moment its a stand-alone application, but it may well be included within cpanminus in the future. As part of writing the application, Breno asked David and myself about how the clients for CPAN::Reporter and CPANPLUS::YACSmoke create the report. Due to the legacy system we came from (email and NNTP) we still use an email style presentation of the reports. However, it has always been our intention to produce structured data. A CPAN Testers Report currently has only two facts that are required, a Legacy Report and a Test Summary. However there are other facts that we have already scoped, except they are just not implemented.
Back last year the Birmingham Perl Mongers produced the CPAN::Testers::Fact::PlatformInfo fact, that consumes the data from Devel::Platform::Info (which we'd written the previous year). The problem with the way test reports are currently created, is that we don't always know the definite platform information for the platform the test suite was run on. Reports, particularly in the Perl Config section, can lie. Not big lies necessarily, but enough that it can disguise why a particular OS may have problems with a particular distribution.
Breno is now looking to produce a module that firstly abstracts all the metadata creation parts from CPAN::Reporter, CPANPLUS::YACsmoke, Test::Reporter as well as his own new application, and puts them into a single library that can then create all the appropriate facts before submitting the report to the metabase. Hopefully he can get this done during the Hackathon, but even if he doesn't, we're hopful that he will get enough done to make it easy to complete soon after. Once we then patch the respective clients to use the new library, we will then start to be able to do interesting things with how we present reports.
The CPAN Testers Reports site only displays the legacy style report, which for most is sufficient, but it really would be nice to have some specially styled presentations for particular sections, or even allow user preferences to show/hide sections automatically when a user reads a report.
This is a site that I have been working on, on and off, for about 4 years, before we even had a Metabase. As a consequence it has been promised at various points and I've always failed to deliver. Now I have release the modules above, and there have been several comments already about having such functionality, I think I need to put some focus on it again. I have shown Breno the site running on my laptop and he has given me some more ideas to make it even more useful. It'll still be awhile before its released, but this will likely be down to running with some beta testers first before a major launch, just so it doesn't break the eco-system too badly!
Essentially the site was written to help authors and testers to highlight dubious reports and have them deleted from the system. Although the reports won't actually be deleted, they will be marked to ignore, so that they can be removed from JSON files and summary requests, as well as on the CPAN Testers Report site. This will hopefully enable us to get more accurate data, and bogus reports about running out of memory or disk space can be disregarded.
However, following Breno suggestions, I will look to making the site more public, so that authors can more easily see the reporting patterns without having to log in. The log in aspect will still be needed to flag reports, but the alternate browsing of reports by testers will be much more accessible.
I would like to thank a few people who have helped to get me here, and have enabled these QA projects, not just CPAN Testers, to advance further.
Firstly I would like to single out ShadowCat Systems, who have very kindly paid for my flight here. Thanks to BooK and Laurent for organising the event, and to all the sponsors and Perl community who have provided the funding for the venue, accommodation and food for the event. It has already been very much appreciated, and hopefully the significant submissions to GitHub and PAUSE are evidence of just how worthwhile this event is.
Thanks also to all those who are here, and are helping out in all shapes and forms to help Perl QA be even better than it already is.
Cross-posted from Memoirs of a Roadie
]]>This marks the second survey for the German Perl Workshop and notes some small differences, while it was the first for the Israeli Perl Workshop. I hope the future organisers can make use of the results and that they allow me to continue the surveys with these workshops next year, and for the years to come.
Although the Israeli Perl Workshop was in English this year, Gabor and I are hoping to be able to provide the survey in Hebrew next year. The German Perl Workshop marked the first survey not in English last year, and it helped to start building up a language pack, which can be used to plugin to the survey software. I plan to formalise this during the year, so that other events, using languages other than English, can still take advantage of the surveys.
Thanks to all the organisers and the survey participants for taking the time to respond to the questions. It is very much appreciated.
Cross-posted from Memoirs of a Roadie
]]>I'm please to say that the survey results from the London Perl Workshop 2011 are now online. Slightly delayed due to Christmas and my new job, but worth the wait I think. This is the first time we've had a survey for the London Perl Workshop, so I was interested to see how the results differed from YAPCs. The attendees for the workshop differ from YAPCs, as although around 40% of attendees are well know within the Perl community and have attended YAPCs, most of the sttendees, like attendees for many other workshops around the world, don't have the resources or availability to attend a 3-5 day conference event. However, a one-day event, and especially a free event, makes a workshop much more accessible.
It was a shame that we only had 27% of attendees responding, but having said that while my personal aim is always to achieve more than 50% response, 27% is still a great response. As I've said previously, anything more than 10% is a good result. However, now we've done one, hopefully we can encourage more to respond this year :)
The demographic responses interestingly followed what we often see for YAPCs. I guess that may be because most of the respondees are YAPC attendees, but we still had several responses from those who have only attended London Perl Workshops, or for whom this was their first major event. The balance of Perl knowledge, although slightly weighted towards the more experience developeres, was also very pleasing to see with several beginners attending the event. Every year we have been looking to encourage newcomers to these events, as well as into the Perl community. After all, those learning Perl now are the Perl community's future. It was also great to see people being nominated or recommended to attend by colleagues and managers. The promotion of these events is obviously having the right effect.
I was intrigued to see that of all the respondees, 65 of them weren't speakers, with 30 willing to consider being a speaker in the future. Again this is something we should be encouraging, as newer speakers often have a different perspective on a subject, and can bring something new and fresh to the event. It was also encouraging that primary motivations for attending are to get together and meet other Perl developers. Events like The London Perl Workshop are a great way to introduce yourself to other developers you may have spoken to online, or are collaborating with on projects. They are a great way to promote your project, or get to know more about other projects.
In response to the question "What aspects of the conference do you feel gave value for money?", I was actually quite surprised to see comments along the lines of "Since it was free, I do not understand what "gave value for money" means." For those attendees who wondered that, how much did it cost you to attend the event? If you think your answer would be "nothing", consider the question beyond the attendance fee. How did you get there, did you walk, get the train, drive? What about your time, what would you have done that Saturday if you hadn't have gone to the event? Just because the event had no attendance fee, doesn't mean it cost you nothing to attend. Also think about what value it has given you in terms of enhancing your knowledge. Did you see talks or meet people that have inspired you, or given you a better understanding of something you were working on. There are lots of ways "value" can be interpreted beyond any monetary value.
It took a lot of people a lot of time and energy to put event like the London Perl Workshop on, not just Mark and his minions, but also the speakers and the sponsors. From their perspective it is good to know their efforts were appreciated. Thanks you to all those who did respond, and of those that didn't, hopefully we can encourage you to contribute your thoughts this year :)
]]>The site has also been update to provide a tabbed display of the different types of event, to make it a little easier to find results. Over the next month or so I am looking to get more of the past data online, as well as the feedback that I normally send to just the organisers. I have lots of data waiting in the wings, and its only been my lack of free time that has prevented me from finishing off the sanity checks.
There are also plans for the future surveys, and as previously mentioned, the German Perl Workshop has given me the push to work with other languages. There is still some work to be done, but the first non-english language survey did seem to go very well. Perhaps understandably there are translations that I missed, so my next step is monitor (particularly for the results pages) London Perl Workshop what was missing, and provide Max (if he doesn't mind of course ;)) with the additional text for translation. I will then use this as a basis for all future workshops, which I will then provide via a git repo for anyone wishing to use the surveys in other languages. Note that for the short term the survey results will be presented in the same language the survey was presented, although in the longer term I would like to be able to allow switching the text (at least the questions) to english or other available languages.
The London Perl Workshop is still running, and has another 2 weeks to run. If you attended the LPW this year, and haven't completed the main survey or the talk evaluations, please take the time, as it really does help the organisers and speakers to make the events better and better.
If you're interested in running a survey for your event next year, please get in touch (barbie@cpan.org) and let me know in plenty of time, particularly if you'd like to run the survey in a non-english language.
Cross-posted from Memoirs of a Roadie
]]>My thanks to all the organisers of GPW2011 and everyone who took the time to respond to the evaluations. From previous experience the speakers have very much appreciated your feedback. I would also like to extend extra special thanks to Max Maischein aka "Corion", who took the time to translate all the questions, templates and emails into German for me.
The results of the main survey will be published soon on the YAPC Conference Surveys site.
This is the first survey that I have undertaken in a non-English language, and for the most part it has been very successful. While there have been some slight problems due to byte vs character lengths (I'll save my 'why-oh-why did we ever start with ASCII and not UTF-8' rant for another day), the work Max has done to provide all the translations has started me on a path to be able to accommodate other languages.
At the moment the plan is to create a GitHub repository of all the necessary files, with language branches containing the appropriate translations. Then should anyone wish to request a survey instance in the future in a non-English language, their first step will then be to provide the necessary translations for me. It currently takes roughly a day to set-up an instance, so drop-in replacements for these files will ease the set-up process. It will also mean that as time goes on and questions get added, refined or deleted, we can replicate these changes across all languages.
I'd like to see the survey site get more use in the future, and although I'm happy to run the survey sites, with the support of Birmingham Perl Mongers, the longer term goal has always been to allow others to create their own instances. With the official release of Labyrinth this year, much of the tool set is now Open Source. I still need to release the Survey Plugin for Labyrinth and the additional command-line tools used, but getting the language translations moving will be a big step forward. Hopefully I'll have more news in the new year.
Cross-posted from Memoirs of a Roadie
]]>