Call for Venue for YAPC::Europe::2017

Although YAPC::Europe::2016 preparations are well underway in Cluj, it is time for the venue committee of the YAPC::Europe Foundation (YEF) to think about the location of the 2017 conference. YAPC::Europe wouldn't exist without dedicated teams of volunteers, and we are always excited to see the enthusiasm and learn about the new ideas the community has to offer.

Further information about preparing a complete application can be found on our website. Proposals submitted to the venue committee will be added to this public repository (you may provide private information separately) to benefit future organizers.

The deadlines which apply to this portion of the procedure are:

Friday, 20 May: Deadline for sending a letter of intent. This letter simply expresses interest in hosting the conference and provides contact information (both email and telephone) for at least two organizers. This is an optional step but it can be to your advantage to alert the venue committee of your proposal.

Thursday, 7 July: Deadline for sending proposals to host YAPC::Europe 2017.

If you do not receive a confirmation for your letter of intent or proposal within a couple of days, please personally contact a member of the venue committee.

Please send your questions, letters of intent, and proposals to venue@yapceurope.org.

Call for Venue for YAPC::Europe 2016

Although YAPC::Europe::2015 preparations are well underway in Granada, it is time for the venue committee of the YAPC::Europe Foundation (YEF) to think about the location of the 2016 conference. YAPC::Europe wouldn't exist without dedicated teams of volunteers, and we are always excited to see the enthusiasm and learn about the new ideas the community has to offer.

Further information about preparing a complete application can be found at here. Proposals submitted to the venue committee will be added to this public repository (you may provide private information separately) to benefit future organizers.

The deadlines which apply to this portion of the procedure are:

  • Friday, 15 May: Deadline for sending a letter of intent. This letter simply expresses interest in hosting the conference and provides contact information (both email and telephone) for at least two organizers. This is an optional step but it can be to your advantage to alert the venue committee of your proposal.
  • Thursday, 16 July: Deadline for sending proposals to host YAPC::Europe 2016.

If you do not receive a confirmation for your letter of intent or proposal within a couple of days, please personally contact a member of the venue committee.

Please send your questions, letters of intent, and proposals to venue@yapceurope.org.

YAPC::Europe 2014, day 2

(cross-posted from blog.tobez.org)

Ignat Ignatov talked about physical formulas. When I was planning to attend this talk, I thought it is going to be some sort of symbolic formulas computation, possibly with an analysis of dimensions of the physical quantities. However, despite my (a bit long in the tooth) background in physics, I did not understand a word of it. Apparently, some sort of unification of physical formulas, not entirely unlike the periodic table in chemistry, was presented, with almost no comprehensible details and with scary words like co-homology and algebraic topology. The fact that half of the slides were in Russian, while irrelevant for me personally, probably did not help matters for the majority of the people in the audience. I did not expect any questions at the end of the talk, but there were at least two, so I was probably wrong about general level of understanding in the audience.

Laurent Dami talked about SQL::Abstract::FromQuery. He presented a query form of the Request Tracker and said that it is too complex - a premise many would agree with. The conclusion was that some more natural way to allow the user to specify complex queries is needed. Surprizingly, the answer to that was to use a formal grammar and make the user adhere to it. To me this sounds weird, but if one can find a non-empty set of users that would tolerate this, it may just work.

Denis Banovic talked about Docker, a virtualization container. I did not know much about Docker until this point, so it was useful to have someone to explain it to me.

The next talk was long, 50 minutes (as opposed to a somewhat standard for this conference 20 minutes) Peter "ribasushi" Rabbitson presented a crash-course in SQL syntax and concepts. It looked like a beginner-level introduction to SQL, but it became better and better as it progressed. I even learned a thing or two myself. ribasushi has a way of explaining rather complicated things concisely, understandably, and memorizably at the same time. Excellent talk.

Then there was a customary Subway sandwiches lunch.

Naim Shafiyev talked about network infrastructure automatization. Since this is closely related to what I do at my day job, I paid considerable attention to what he had to say. I did not hear anything new, but hopefuly the rest of the audience found the talk more useful. It did inspire me to submit a lightning talk though.

osfameron talked about immutable data structures in Perl and how to clone them with modifications, while making sure that the code does not look too ugly. Pretty standard stuff for functional languages, but pretty unusual in the land of Perl. The presentation was lively, with a lot of funny pictures and Donald duck examples.

The coffee break was followed by another session of lightning talks, preceeded by a give-away of a number of free books for the first-time YAPC attendees. Among the talks I remembered were SQLite virtual tables support in Perl by Laurent Dami, web-based database table editor by Simun Kodzoman, LeoNerd's presentation about XMPP replacement called Matrix, a Turing-complete (even if obfuscated) templating system by Jean-Baptiste Mazon of Sophia (sp!), and annoucements of Nordic Perl Workshop 2014 (Helsinki, November) and Nordic Perl Workshop 2015 (Oslo, May).

Again, I did not go to the end-of-the-day keynote.

As a side note, the wireless seemed to be substantially more flaky than yesterday, which has affected at least some lightning talk presenters.

YAPC::Europe 2014, day 1

(crossposted from blog.tobez.org)

When I came to the venue 15 minutes before the official start of the registration, people at the registration desk were busily cutting sheets of paper into attendees' badges. Finding my badge turned out to be a tad not trivial.

This conference is somewhat unusual not only because it is conducted over the weekend instead of in the middle of the week, but also because the keynotes for every day are pushed till the end, even after the daily lightning talks session.

The welcome talk from Marian was about practical things such as rooms locations, dinner, lunches, transportations and so on. Then I went on stage to declare the location of YAPC::Europe 2015 (which is Granada, Spain by the way). After that Jose Luis Martinez from Barcelona.pm did a short presentation of YAPC in Granada, and Diego Kuperman gave a little present from Granada to Sofia.

Mihai Pop of Cluj.pm presented a talk called "Perl Secret". It was basically a 20-minutes version of BooK's lightning talk about Perl secret operators, somewhat duluted by interspersing references to minions. It was entertaining.

The great Mark Overmeer talked about translation with context. He went beyond the usual example of multiple variants of plural values in some languages, and talked about solving localization problems related to gender and so on. The module solving these problems is Log::Report::Translate::Context. As always, great attention to details from Mark.

After lunch (sandwiches from Subway), Alex Balhatchet of Nestoria presented hurdles of geocoding, with solutions. I and my co-workers had encountered similar problems on a far smaller scale, so I could understand the pains, and had a great interest in hearing about the solutions.

Then I attended a very inspiring talk by Max Maischein from Frankfurt about using Perl as a DNLA remote and as a DNLA media server. I immediately felt the urge to play with the code he published and try to adapt it to my own TV at home. There was even a live demo of using DNLA to stream to Max's laptop a live stream of the talk provided by the conference organizers. And it even worked, mostly.

Ervin Ruci talked more about geocoding — this talk was partially touching the same problems Alex Balhatchet was talking about. Unfortunately, it was substantially less detailed, so I was somewhat underwhelmed by it. The presenter mentioned cool things like dealing with fuzzyness of the input data using hidden Markov models, but did not expand on them.

StrayTaoist described how to access raw data from space telescopes using (of course) Perl. Very lively talk. There was a lot of austronomy porn in here.

Luboŝ Kolouch from Czech Republic talked about automotive logistics, and how open source solutions work where proprietory solutions do not. The software needs to be reliable enough to make sure that it takes only 1.5 hours between the part order and its physical delivery to the factory.

After coffee break with more mingling the inimitable R Geoffrey Avery choir-mastered an hour of lightning talks. Most talks were somewhat "serious" today; I hope we see more "fun" ones in the next coming days.

Unfortunately, I missed the first keynote of the conference from Curtis "Ovid" Poe, so cannot really say anything about it.

Finally, we went to Restaurant Lebed for the conference dinner. The location is superb, there is a great view over a lake. The food was great, too. We also got to enjoy some ethnic Bulgarian music and dancing, not too much, and not too little.

Lots of cheers to Marian and the team of volunteers for organizing what so far turns out to be a great conference.

Call for Venue for YAPC::Europe::2015

Although YAPC::Europe::2014 preparations are well underway in Sofia, it is time for the venue committee of the YAPC::Europe Foundation (YEF) to think about the location of the 2015 conference. YAPC::Europe wouldn’t exist without dedicated teams of volunteers, and we are always excited to see the enthusiasm and learn about the new ideas the community has to offer.

Further information about preparing a complete application can be found on http://www.yapceurope.org/organizers/index.html . Proposals submitted to the venue committee will be added to this public repository (you may provide private information separately) to benefit future organizers.

The deadlines which apply to this portion of the procedure are:

  • Friday, 25 April: Deadline for sending a letter of intent. This letter simply expresses interest in hosting the conference and provides contact information (both email and telephone) for at least two organizers. This is an optional step but it can be to your advantage to alert the venue committee of your proposal.
  • Monday, 7 July: Deadline for sending proposals to host YAPC::Europe 2015.

If you do not receive a confirmation for your letter of intent or proposal within a couple of days, please personally contact a member of the venue committee.

Please send your questions, letters of intent, and proposals to venue@yapceurope.org.