Your Fantasy Perl Conference schedule
What talks do you want to hear at conferences? I recently finished going through the proposals for OSCON, and the ones I thought were really good were the ones the Perl committee solicited or helped to develop. That is, instead of waiting to see what speakers suggested and lived with that, we went out to get what we wanted. And, I think this is going to be a pretty good OSCON for Perl.
At Frozen Perl, Chris Prather, one of the organizers for YAPC::NA 2011, was telling me about their plan to schedule talks first and find speakers later. I was just checking the YAPC::Rīga website, and They are doing the same thing.
As a frequent speaker, I've lately been asking the conference to suggest topics to me. It's more challenging for me that way and raises my game a bit. Maybe that will work for other speakers as well.
So, imagine your fantasy conference (unrestrained Perl conference schedule, not conference about fantasies). You're the organizer. What would you put in the schedule and who would you assign the talks to?
I have a long list, but I'll give you a couple of them:
- Surviving Perl and Unicode (Tom Christiansen)
- Fast data with PDL (???)
- Perl and the new HTML5 (???)
- Git Boot Camp (Scott Chacon)
Suggest your own three topics, maybe with speakers attached, and perhaps the organizers can twist some arms. Chris did mention that he initially had to twist arms but his targets eventually relented.
I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).
I'm not above twisting arms for YAPC::NA this year either. The call for speakers closes March 24th, so if people have good suggestions fantasy could become reality.
Web framework throwdown Mojolicious vs Dancer vs Catalyst. Make a forum in 30 minutes or less. A major member of each community. Then have a session afterward where the teams discuss what they came up with, what worked, what didn't.
AnyEvent/Coro vs POE throwdown. Same as above, but for async. Maybe make a networkable cron in 30 minutes.
My interest in the throwdowns is that I've personally compared both sets in much this manner, but I'm not an expert with any of these technologies. It would be interesting to have a real compare and contrast of these technologies from a person who is really an expert with each.
I'm not sure I know any experts in the AnyEvent/Coro community ... or the Mojolicious community but I'm open to this.
I could easily see structuring it in a 50 minute session 10 minutes of High Level Intro from each of the web frameworks (or 15 from the event frameworks), and then 20 minutes of Q&A from the audience.
I know that Marc Lehmann isn't exactly known for speaking engagements, but he's certainly the expert since he wrote it!
I don't know if Sebastian Riedel speaks or not, but he's a pretty prolific blogger, so if invited he probably would come to speak about Mojo.
Brock Wilcox (awwaiid) has given talks at dc.pm on Coro-related code. I bet he could be arm-twisted into doing something Coro-ish at YAPC::NA if need be.
Bring it.
I think that the format well suited for comparisons would be a panel discussion, with maybe a few short introductory presentations. Recently we (warszawa.pm and Polish Linux Users Group) did a cross-language (Java, C++, Perl, Python) panel discussion on Dependency Injection and it worked very well (but sure Java was overrepresented).
By the way if we are talking about dreams - then definitively the person I would like to hear at a Perl conference is Misko Hevery.
Internals. Internals. Internals.
Anything I can learn about what's going on underneath the covers is good. Bring on perlhack, perlguts, etc.
@perigrin: Do you want an AnyEvent talk and not have one yet? I've been working with it extensively the last couple months and definitely have learned some thing I think I could pass on. Especially since all the example code in the docs are tiny trivial snippets and things tend to work *quite* a bit differently in a significant project.
I'll hit you up on irc about this :)
A couple of talks I'd like to see:
Eliot: I don't think people are glad hearing about internals at conferences.
Conferences are not technical, workshops or user group meetings are. Conferences are mainly social. I only dared to explain guts and internals at workshops.
@Gabor, I've submitted a YAPC talk for writing Facebook apps in Perl using Facebook::Graph. No idea if it will get approved, or how much time they'll give me for it.
That talk would make great articles for Perl.com.
@chromatic, but I'm illiterate and couldn't possibly write an article for perl.com. =)
I could recommend a good editor of the trained human kind.