Author: arved

It’s been six years since i last attended a Chaos Communication Congress. Since last time i had to wait very long at the entrance, i decided to buy my ticket on Day 0 this time.
I arrived a few minutes after 18:00 when the ticket counter should open. Quite a lot of people where already lined up. But the counter did not open, because of a “network issue”. We had to wait for an hour in the cold (approx. 0°C). Then the line was relocated to the inside, and we had to wait another half hour until we were finally able to buy a ticket.
So yeah, i was reminded why it is called “chaos” communication congress. I hope tomorrow will be organized better.

So YAPC 2007 is over by now. It was quite a dense conference with talks from 9 to 18.00, short breaks and of course an attendendees dinner, so i did not had much time to write a blog entry, because when i came home, i had to fall asleep immediately to be fit for the next day.
So i will try to recapitulate what happend:
Day1: There was some confusion at the beginning, because i was late because of a subway defect and lots of people also wanted to register at the last minute. The registration desk decided to pause registration for the keynote.
First short talk was by Jose Castro about “How to get the most out of a YAPC”. His mantra was “socialize”. Well i failed miserably at the networking game, because it took me until the last day to look onto the backside of my WLAN accound sheet to discover that i need to look for a guy called “Erik Østlyngen”. So no prize for me.
Next was the keynote by Larry Wall. I didn’t really get the point maybe because of the bad acoustic on the right side of the man auditorium. Afterwards i headed to Room 2. Unfortunately Room 1 and Room2 are quite a walk away in the basement, while most of the conference was happening in the first floor. Grrrr’s talk just before lunch about his SQL->Perl abstraction layer was quite interesting. After lunch i went to room 2 again where i stayed the rest of day. My personal highlights were the talk “Gluing a bank together with perl” and the talk about Debians perl packagemaintainers. What i like about the talks program was, that not all talks were of the same length. If you didn’t have much to say you could give a 5min lightning talk, the short talk was 20 minutes, the average was 40 minutes and the longest were about 90min. So the speakers weren’t in need to expand or compress their material.
Second day started with Damian Conways “Anti-social perl” which was very funny madness. Before lunch i went to the testing track, because wanting to learn more about testing was next to curiosity one of the main reasons to attend the conference. Now i have got a Test::Smoke script running on my box, and a half way installation of CPAN::Reporter. Hopefully i have the time to finish this.
After the second coffeebreak… BTW. i found the food supplied in the coffeebreaks strange. In the morning break they offered sweet stuff and in the afternoon a non-sweet second breakfast. I would have done it the other way round. Well after the second coffeebreak i went to Mark Dominus’ High Order Parsing Techniques, which was one the highlights of the conference being a great show while still being a technical talk. But i still don’t understand why the chalkboard wasn’t collapsing when mjd did his freeclimbing intermezzo.
The attendees Dinner took place at a large Heurigen in Transdanubia. Unfortunately they were not prepared to so many people, which resulted in having to wait for a long time to get something to drink or eat. (Did they really had only two waitresses serving drinks for all the people?) Many non-local attendees were quite surprised that they served wine and only wine. I went home with the second shuttlebus, which for unknown reasons went on an odyssee through Vienna (From Strebersdorf to the WU via Schwedenplatz). It would have been nice to communicate this route before, so that i could have taken public transport instead.
On the third day were the lightning talks, which was a great idea, there were some gems included. Afterwards i attended the Regexp talks, which was way over my head. Of course i admire the madness of programming the sudoku solver in regular expressions. After lunch i attended the social talks in the main auditorium.
The conference finished with an auction. They had quite a few interesting items, so i planned to place a bid, but i didn’t expect the perl communities to be that crazy. Even if it was for a good purpose i would never spent more than 100 EUR for a T-Shirt (even if it is a rare “unique” YAPC::South America shirt).
Well lucky for me most people didn’t get, that there were some items sold via silent auction as well. One could write down bids on a paper instead of yelling them through the auditorium. So i managed to win an ActiveState Shirt which looks cool for only 15 EUR and a Perl Poloshirt for 10 Euros (well it has the wrong color and the wrong size, but i could not resist…).
In summary it was worth attending the conference, although i am not a diehard perl programmer. The community was great and the organizers did a great job.
While i was adding YAPC:EU to my events list, i noticed, that i haven’t been on a geek conference for two years. This ought to change.