Re: My Impressions of YAPC::Asia 2006 in Tokyo

[mattr]

Well here's a long comment to this thread.. thinking back on the YAPC I have some more comments based on some things I was strongly feeling then and now.

There is definitely something to be said both for virtual and meatspace meetings. For this conference one thing I noticed speaking both languages is that some of the humor from each side (foreigners and Japanese) did penetrate (the talks did include bilingual slides where possible), but in particular most of the Japanese geek humor did not make it over to the English side, and the lightning talks (both languages) were both hilarious (Audrey's was fabulous and hilarious) and and so fast that even native speakers had trouble keeping up - so a lot went over the heads of Japanese. I think it would be cool if they were kept online (as they will this time) so people who honestly paid the money could catch those nuances, and see the sessions they missed.

Also, I know it was run on a shoestring and especially the foreign visitors may need to make a living doing this sort of thing too, which is why maybe all the slides won't be online possibly I hear, but certainly there must be a way for people to somehow participate intellectually and personally even if they can't come to the location. Perhaps if you pay a YAPC entrance fee you get to see all YAPC materials from around the world for a year? Or maybe pay as much as one extra conference's entrance fee for that right? Dunno.

Of course free as in beer and CPAN and the Artistic License/GPL are also important, as long as there is some solution. Of course maybe I don't really know the actual purpose of YAPC, this was my first one after all. But it seems to me that aside from the speakers and some other diehards who can take time off and jaunt around the world, YAPC is less about lateral communication between different groups of Perl people, and more about bringing the taste of the core group to a local market.

Which is okay, I guess, since of course it is always timely information being presented, but there could be more dialog in the community based around YAPC if it promoted a persistent, evolving dialog and participation to the extent of knowing what was discussed at faraway YAPCs. Or am I totally off? Maybe Perlmonks is the main way this lateral communication occurs. I met one new friend who is a Perl programmer living in Tokyo and it turns out he doesn't go to PM but hangs out on the perl channel (I take it maybe there is a #perl irc channel somewhere?). It was easily said but shocked me that there were these cool people programming perl in my vicinity and yet using a totally orthogonal communications protocol unknown to me! Eeek!

Finally I think that meeting people is definitely a big part of YAPC as far as I can tell, I know a high point of my experience was Ingie dot Net giving me a one on one demo on his Apple laptop showing me how he used Javascript (Editted- Actually it is XUL, and Ingie also made is own library after deciding Takahashi's which everyone was using was not "wierd enough") to program his presentation slides.. apparently an ongoing battle to see how close to the start of the presentation the speaker actually writes his notes. Looks like a good trick to know!

Also there was a dear moment when I remember Damian as he revealed some deep conceptual magic to Japanese Perl developers, saying "The trick is to return an object." (in his "Sufficiently Advanced Technology" talk when he was discussing how a multiplexed error message could be returned and handled differently by different functions.. and advocating the embedding of such "magical" code away from sight so that you can reduce the amount of code you need to type). When he said those words it was like light dawning, and I heard a collective "Ohhh" sigh of comprehension arise from the people around me! *shivers* I guess you had to be there. Of course I didn't catch the whole thing since I had business and just got back before that line. Have to catch the videos.

I did think about an experience at a Java One conference I went to, to help a friend who was an organizer. They had a lightning demos kind of thing where a couple hundred Java programmers clustered around a projection screen and took turns giving really fast demos of something they had whipped up and talking about it, answering a couple of questions and then the next. My friend Andoh had made an OpenGL (sloooowly) rotatable cube on his mobile phone so I remember it. That would be a nice thing to do at YAPC. Lots of enthusiasm and fun, and you can meet people too.

Also a long-running issue with me not just with this conference is I'd like to know who the other people coming to the event are, so I could meet up with them or something. I did meet great people but probably not even 95% of those attending, and for a newcomer to the community who doesn't even know where it is, that would be nice. There is Shibuya Perl Mongers (though the homepage was a bit old) and maybe I'll pick that up in the future too. In all I really liked the YAPC event and am looking forward to checking out the sessions I missed when the video came out. I don't know the resolution but at least you will be able to see the giant font sized lightning presentations that memed through from one session to the next, and get a feeling for what was discussed.

Connecting that to the fiber meeting idea posted above, I guess it would be nice if you could pick up on the YAPC through the net that way and then discuss it with your local monks/mongers group, which might then produce some result and have it posted back to the world in a way everyone (including YAPC participants) could discover easily. Well, these are the rantings of an excited YAPC newbie. I guess the only cure is to go to another one huh?