YAPC::EU is over

Благодаря ти Марияне, че направи това събитие истина! - Thank you Mariane, for making this event true!

Many of the the recorded videos of the talks are on Youtube already.

I met splendid people there. Yet once again my doubts about the vitality of this community showed to be pointless. And it is hard to understand how it continues to exist without a giant company to push the technology behind it further.  Yes there are companies that supported the event. The technologies them selves (http://www.perl6.org/ and http://www.perl.org/) however exist and evolve thanks to enthusiasts from the community. The Perl Foundation helps a lot.

Everybody is back to the usual activities

Me too. It is great that some companies recognize what we do and share (even be it minimal) part of their enormous profits. Most of the companies using the technology just take. Most of us work for such companies. So even those companies give back "unconsciously" by paying our salaries. But we decide what to spend some of our free days for.

What we (those of us,

working for such companies) could try is to improve the development process in a way to make it possible in-house improvements and fixes to modules we use to go back to the source on CPAN or at least GitHub.  And then back to your code again after upgrade. Tools for managing local repositories are available and Stratopan is there already.

A first step would be to make the employer upgrade to a recent version of Perl. And it takes lots of bureaucracy to even make them hear you. What can you do when they tell you "the risk is bigger than the expected benefits"? How to persuade them that the benefits are bigger actually? How to persuade them that by not upgrading you just add technical debt. Until someone with a fat salary and highly in the feudal hierarchy (Thanks Curtis) comes and say: "We will move to .Net or Java or..."? This happens just because this person have read somewhere those trendy sequences of symbols on a beautifully looking site with a known logo on it. Or most probably will get some percentage of the next big deal...

I want to know how to persuade the business people to invest something in the technology they use and abuse for free.

The only way I keep and can improve my coding and software development skills is by writing Open Source Code and reading on-line. (Some of us are lucky to have this as part of their daily job.)  But I am stubborn and continue...

Ado continues

I will continue with news about it. This was my first YAPC and I dared to present it. From the video tough it is not easily understandable for the uninitiated what I am talking about. I consider this my fault. Next time I should request longer time for the talk. Add more examples. Point with finger in the code, the file tree. Explain how we are forcing the developers to write code that will live longer. Explicitly state, propose and invite people for discussion on the development cycle. Etc., Etc...

And now I have to go and fix my breaking tests after the last Mojolicious upgrade. This still happens from time to time, but having most of the written code covered with tests makes it easy to upgrade and synchronize with Mojolicious.

Be healthy.