YAPC::Europe 2014, day 1

By tobez on August 22, 2014 10:02 PM

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.