I’ve been back from Cluj-Napoca for almost a week, so I should really write down what I remember about YAPC Europe before it’s all forgotten.

Day -1

I arrived in Cluj-Napoca on Sunday evening and got to my hotel quickly. There was just time for a quick meal before bed.

Monday was the day that I was going to get to grips with the city. After meeting a few Perl Mongers at breakfast, my wife and I set off to explore. My first target was to find Cluj Hub, the venue where I was running a training course the following day. That was simple and took less than fifteen minutes. We then explored both the Orthodox and Catholic cathedrals before settling into a bar on the main square called “Guevara” for a coffee. After that we decided that we needed to pick up some supplies and whilst on that hunt we bumped into Max Maischein who recommended a visit to the botanical gardens.

On returning to the hotel with our supplies, we met Curtis Poe and invited him to join us for lunch. Wandering at random we found a really good restaurant called Livada and enjoyed a very pleasant meal.

After lunch we spent a very enjoyable couple of hours in the botanical gardens and only just failed to get back to the hotel before it really started raining. That evening we ate in restaurant really close to the hotel called the Crying Monkey (but in Romanian).

Day 0

Tuesday was my “Modern Web Development with Perl and Dancer” training course. This was by far the most successful training course that I’ve ever run at a YAPC. I’ll write more about it when I get the feedback results, but I think that the attendees enjoyed it. I know I had great fun giving it. Cluj Hub was a great venue and Andra Gligor and her small team looked after us all really well.

That evening, the traditional pre-conference meet-up was held on the roof of Evozon’s offices. As always, it was lovely to catch-up with old friends that I only get to see once or twice a year.

Day 1

On Wednesday, I set off in plenty of time to find the venue. It turned out that our hotel was really well located for both sight-seeing and the conference and I got there in ten minutes or so. The registration queues seemed shorter than usual and before long I had my name-tag and bag of conference swag.

As always, there were far too many good talks and it was impossible to see everything. I’ll just talk about the talks that I saw. Everything was videoed, so it will all be online soon.

The day began with Amalia welcoming us to the conference. Then the YAPC Europe Foundation announced that next year’s conference will be in Amsterdam. This is the first time that the conference has returned to a previous city (the second YAPC Europe was held in Amsterdam back in 2001) and I’m looking forward to going.

The first day’s keynote was from Curtis Poe. It was a wide-ranging talk covering the history and future of both Perl and the Perl community. After that I went into one of the small rooms to see H. Merijn Brand talking about his recent improvements to Perl’s CSV parser followed by Alex Muntada on how the Debian project packages CPAN modules. I then went back to the main room to see Mickey Nasriachi talking about PONAPI, which is a Perl implementation of JSONAPI.

Lunch suffered slightly from the inevitable queues, but it was worth the wait as the quality of the food (as it was throughout the conference) was very high.

After lunch I saw Lee Johnson giving some Git tips, Sawyer talking about the XS guts of Ref::Util and Jose Luis Martinez talking about PAWS (the Perl interface to Amazon Web Services). I saw Jose Luis talking about PAWS last year in Granada but really wanted to see how the project is progressing. I think this has the potential to be a great advocacy tool for Perl.

A quick coffee break and then I saw Thomas Klausner give his opinions on writing API endpoints and Tina Müller talking about App::Spec which looks like a great tool for easily writing command line applications.

Then it was was lightning talks. They were the usual combination of the useful, the banal and the ridiculous. I think the highlight for me was Curtis Poe announcing more details of his online game (which is now officially called Tau Station). This was the point at which I announced Cultured Perl – which seems to be going well so far.

That evening was the conference dinner. Which was a buffet party held in the open-air quadrangle at the centre of the Banffy Palace (Cluj’s major art museum). A great time was had by all.

Day 2

Another day, another keynote. This time it was Sawyer X with “The State of the Velociraptor” – an annual round-up of what’s going on in the Perl 5 world. This year Sawyer found a number of volunteers who all gave short talks about their part of the Perl community. This was a great idea which was only slightly marred by the fact that the projector wasn’t at all happy changing laptops – so the switches between presenters weren’t as smooth as they could have been.

After that I saw Max talking about how he uses ElasticSearch on his laptop to give himself a local search engine and Job van Achterberg talking about making web sites more accessible. This was a great talk – particularly the sections where he showed just how bad most web sites appear to screen readers.

Another queue for another great lunch. And also many interesting conversations.

After lunch I saw a former colleague, Mirela Iclodean, talking about how her company have managed to shoe-horn many modern tools and practices into their working day – while still maintaining a nasty monolithic code-base which they are slowly chipping away at. It was a great talk and it made me miss working on that project. I’m hoping that she will repeat this talk at the London Perl Workshop.

Later that afternoon, I gave my “Error(s) Free Programming” talk – in a slot where every speaker was a London.pm leader. The talk seemed to go down well, but somehow I ran considerably short.

After that I saw Albert Hilazo talk about his first few months as a Perl programmer. I found this really interesting as Albert talked in some detail about things that other language communities provide but he found hard to find for Perl. In particular, he would like to see more “war story” blog posts showing how people have solved particular problems using Perl tools.

Then it was Matt Trout celebrating ten years in the Perl community by explaining how his career was largely a series of happy accidents and that a lot of the responsibilities he has taken on were just through being in the wrong place at the wrong time – or something like that.

One talk I couldn’t miss was Andrew Yates talking about the work that his team do at the European Bioinformatics Institute. I couldn’t miss it as I was at least partly responsible for Andrew proposing the talk. I ran some training at the EBI earlier this year and during our email conversation YAPC was mentioned and Andrew asked if people might be interested in hearing about their work. I replied “hell, yes!” and sent him a link to the talk proposal web page.

And then, of course, there another ten or so lightning talks to close the day entertainingly.

Day 3

The keynote speaker on the last day was Larry Wall. His topic was “Strange Consistency”. If you’ve seen Larry speak before, you’ll know what it was like.

I followed that by watching Jason Clifford talk about how his team had written a major new toolset in Perl despite management pressure to use other technologies. The project, of course, ended up being very successful.

One of the most interesting talks was Nicholas Clark’s view of an alternative universe where Jon Orwant never threw those mugs in 2000 and the Perl 6 project was never started. The main lesson appeared to be “what goes around, comes around” and his fictional universe didn’t end up too far away from where we are now.

The afternoon had a curious combination of some time slots where I wanted to see every talk and others where I didn’t really want to see anything. So in some cases I’m eagerly awaiting the videos going online and in others I sat in the back of the room only half-concentrating while giving most of my attention to Twitter or Facebook.

I really enjoyed Sawyer talking about the things that were added in Perl 5.24 (and very carefully not talking about the things that were added in previous versions) and also Jose Luis Perez talking about what he has got out of doing the CPAN Pull Request Challenge.

The final lightning talks were as much fun as they always are. The projectors were still giving the speakers plenty of technical difficulties which led to lots of time for “lightning adverts” between the talks. I think that towards the end the differences between the two rather broke down and on the video at one point I expect you’ll hear Geoff Avery saying “I seem to have lost control of this”.

The conference ended, as it always does, with a brief presentation from the organisers of next year’s conference, a final thank-you to all of the speakers and sponsors and a standing ovation for the organisers.

This was one of the best-organised YAPCs I’ve been to for a very long time. And Cluj-Napoca is a city I would never have considered visiting if it wasn’t for the Perl community there. And already I’m considering a return visit. I had a lovely time in the city and returned to London completely recharged and reinvigorated.

See you all in Amsterdam next year.

Also published on Medium.