YAPC::NA 2012: Mojolicious, swag, and pizzazz
The Intro to Mojolicious talk at YAPC::NA 2012 was a success!
One person came up afterwards and told me it was one of the most cogent talks at the conference. Awesome! I was definitely shooting for cogent. Someone else even mentioned that it was their favorite talk of the event, and that is indeed high praise for which I am truly grateful.
I put a lot of work into the flow of the presentation, intending for it to come across as much like a mojocast as possible. In watching the video content all over the web, I've noticed a distinct lack of cohesion in the presentation of information, and I wanted to make sure I've done everything possible to ease the transition of data into others' brains.
It's fantastic that a subset of the videos have been posted to youtube; that many more search results for modern Perl information. The more creative lightning talks were my favorite.
Sometimes, the the video of the speaker covers up necessary information in the slides:
I've put together a higher quality video of the Mojolicious presentation, complete with some post-editing pizzazz that gives it that extra edge. My edited rendition fades out the speaker video when necessary:
It also displays summarized questions as they are being asked, so as to include the online viewer in the fun:
The edited video also displays well at resolutions of 1024x768.
The pizzazzed presentation, as well as the set of resources and links mentioned in the talk is available at http://mojocasts.com/yapc/.
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I was much more interested in speaking with the general populace of the event than certain "known" names. I would often sit down in a new group of people and begin talking.
Easily, my favorite person of the entire event was @dswallis. She gave a lightning talk about how the word "Monger" has no relevance, and that the M of PM needs a better meaning.
Agreed.
I also enjoyed the job fair. I'm rarely looking for a job, but I'm always open to being convinced. It was interesting to see how each company chose to present themselves. I would have expected ActiveState to have more of a presence, but when I went by their booth, no one was there. Maybe that's why they were hiring.
That brings us to the swag.
My favorite was definitely LiquidWeb's hero:
Followed by OmniIT's throwable brain.
Booking had a strong presence, mostly due to the pleasant presence of Ingrid. I stole many of their globes for no reason in particular.
Shutterstock had a little paper thing, which @belden told me was face decoration. He's a liar. It's clearly beard decoration:
Linode had some pretty neat stickers. I ganked more than my fair share, and stand by my actions.
I'm happy to have attended the event. Given that this was my first tech conference, Perl, as it most often does, sets the standard that everything else is to be compared by.
I do not like the status quo. There is always a better way; the question is whether you care enough to find it.
I agree with not liking "Monger", but even more I dislike "YAPC" as a name, because the "Yet Another" thing is too clever, and at this point it's the only Perl Conference anyway.
I've never liked the "Yet Another" prefix either. I spoke with quite a few people in Madison that were not part of the event, and found that the self-deprecating humor of the name doesn't transfer well to previously uninterested parties.