Buddy Burden

[This is my seventh YAPC / TPC.  If you like, you can read about my other YAPC experiences: YAPC 2011, YAPC 2013, YAPC 2014, YAPC 2015, YAPC 2016, YAPC 2018.]

Well, after taking a very long break inspired (to understate it a bit) by the pandemic, I’m back to attending in-person Perl events with my seventh YAPC.  Or, The Perl Conference, I suppose, but it still feels like YAPC to me.  As per usual, here are some reflections.

First off, this felt like a bit of a light turn-out this year.  Partially I’m sure that’s due to this only being the third conference since the pandemic, but it may also have something to do with the aging of our language.  The number of times I looked around and thought, “man! everyone here is really old” was probably only exceeded by the times I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and remembered that I’m pretty damned old myself.  That’s not to say that there weren’t a few younger folks there, but the median age was surely well north of college and not that far south of senior center.  The accumulated weight of all of our AARP cards was not insignificant, is what I’m saying.

There was also some feeling that the community may have been fractured by recent events.  If you haven’t yet watched Sawyer X’s talk from last year about the failure of Perl 7, I highly recommend it.  Perhaps these sorts of divisions were why a bunch of speakers that I normally love to watch were absent: no Sawyer X, no Rik Signes, no Stevan Little, no Larry Wall, no VM Brasseur or Piers Cawley (although at least a few of those folks haven’t done a Perl conference in several years now, I’m sure).  And it’s not just speakers I was missing: I’m not sure I’ve ever attended a YAPC with no Liz and Wendy before, and I found that I missed seeing them around.  Still, several of the great speakers of yore were there—Ovid (Curtis Poe), Ingy döt Net, Bruce Gray, Damian Conway—as were some friendly faces that I was very pleased to see again, such as my very good friend David Hand, and Michael Hamlin, who is one of those people I see just about every conference and hang around with for a good deal of the time and then the following year have absolutely no clue what his name is.  Perhaps I’ll do better at remembering it next time (though I’m not holding my breath).

Ovid’s opening keynote was very good, and I don’t want to downplay that—people who know me will know that showing up at 10am means I’m really into whatever your event is—but the highlight for me was the second keynote, by the Damian: “The Once and Future Perl”.  The first time I saw Damian talk was at the 2009 OSCON, where, if memory serves (and it very well may not) he first blew my mind with Regexp::Debugger.  And many of you already know that he has a tendency to blow your mind pretty much every time.  This time was no exception.  I cannot begin to tell you how overjoyed I was to hear Damian describe Switch::Back and Switch::Right.  After so many times hearing that smartmatch just “couldn’t be fixed” and that’s why we had to remove it, I feel entirely justified in seeing this as a big middle finger (or perhaps even a forearm jerk) to those folks.  Although I’m sure Damian didn’t mean it that way, as he’s too nice a guy.  But perhaps we could lean into the Australian stereotypes and imagine Damian saying “that’s not a smartmatch ... now, that’s a smartmatch.” Or, at the very least, “hold my beer.” And, honestly, that was probably the least impressive part of the talk.  It was, sadly, remote, but still very very awesome for all that.

As I noted in my survey response, I was very appreciative of what I’m pretty sure was my first YAPC that didn’t have me traveling on Father’s Day, but I have to say I was a bit disappointed to be in Las Vegas on the hottest week of the year (unless maybe it got hotter after we left ... I shudder to think).  Hitting upwards of 109°F (or ~43°C, for our non-American friends), I was literally in the position of not being able to walk the 3 minutes from my room to the conference rooms because it was an outdoors walk, and arriving drenched in sweat would have been the best outcome I could have hoped for.  Given how out-of-shape I am these days, I wouldn’t have taken heatstroke off the table.  The venue itself was ... okay.  I’ve had better, I’ve had worse.  The hotel gave off the vibe of one which had perhaps once been rather natty, but nowadays was in want of some TLC.  We had tons of niggling little problems, but I’ll give credit where credit is due: the hotel staff were always extremely eager to help me fix them.

I also brought my younger two children.  For previous YAPCs, I’ve attended without any children, with only my eldest, with my elder two, and with all three.  Now my younger two are 12 and 18 and my eldest is off in the wide world doing their own thing.  The last time they were in Vegas was for my eldest’s 16th birthday, so the smaller two were 10½ and 4½ respectively, and I’m not sure how much they remember of the trip.  So we thought it would be fun to take them back and do some of the things we did back in 2014, such as watching the fountain show at the Bellagio and the chocolate factory and cactus garden at Ethel M.  They didn’t attend too many of the conference events, though I did purchase them tickets to the banquet dinner (a.k.a. the Tournament of Kings show at the Excalibur) and we spent a bit of time playing games with Lena Hand and a lovely fellow from London named Daniel.

But the game-playing BoF was emblematic of the whole experience: the room scheduled for the Game Night BoF was locked when we arrived (and we were over half an hour late ourselves), and I had to find a hotel staff member to unlock the room then start calling people and posting on the Perl Foundation Slack to drum up interest.  Even after all that, there were probably less than 10 people in the room at the height of attendance.  And of course one of the highlights of past YAPCs for me, the Bad Movie BoF, is no more, because David Adler and Jeff Goff (DrForr), who used to organize it, have both passed away.  Sure, someone else could step up and try to organize one at a future conference, but no one else has the extensive library of MST3K, RiffTrax, Cinematic Titanic, and just plain bad movies sans commentary tracks that David had, so it would be tough to replicate those days.  We may never see them again.

So the conference was still good, and fun, and informative, and I’m super glad I went, and I hope to go again someday.  But I can’t deny that this year was different in some fundamental—and not particularly encouraging—way.  I remain hopeful that future conferences will continue to improve, but we also can’t deny that our community continues to get older, our language continues to depreciate in popularity, and our job market continues to dwindle.  Still, I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic.  Perl conferences can once again become just as amazing as they have been in the past, and I fully plan to be there when that day comes back around.