This week we had the 21st(!) German Perl Workshop, this time in Munich, which is just a short train ride from Vienna. I stayed in a hotel very near the venue and opposite of a huge fitness center with an all-glass front, so one could watch people slave away on the treadmills. The pre-conf meeting took place at a Lebanese restaurant, where Jens and Wendy treated our table with a 40-plate meze "starter".

This was followed by three days of Perl talks, ranging from very technical to artsy and political.

Some highlights

It seems I didn't had to learn vue, as we can now run Perl in the browser.

Queuing for 45min to get some Ramen can be worth it.

The μc³ Hackerspace has some fancy light- ("all colors are beautiful") and sound-shows (hard-disks playing the Ghostbusters theme song), and a very cool analog display panel that can be controlled via IRC.

Perl 6 keeps getting to look cooler and cooler. I wish I could find some time to properly play around with it...

The attendees dinner took place in a different kind of Hackerspace, where I ate too much Spanferkel. Thanks to Perceptyx for sponsoring the drinks (some of which come in absurdly big glasses...)

The too-much-eating part was mitigated by the rather scarce catering during the breaks. I never managed to get a sandwich (but there was plenty of soup), but on the second day I was introduced to the ice cream vending machine in the cafeteria. But to be fair, the orgas assumed that most people would go to some of the restaurants near the venue for lunch, completely missing the inherent laziness of (Perl) people...

Simbabque showed us some good ideas on how to find humans to turn into developers (i.e. hiring).

Though I missed the talk, I like it that Corion also talks about some of the more advanced SQL features (window functions, CTE s).

features (window functions, s). I've heard somebody besides me talking about Bread::Board :-)

We can and should do various things to reduce CO2 from our atmosphere to stop global warming.

from our atmosphere to stop global warming. In one of the best talks, haj showed us a handy way (for Germans) to remember the code point for 🐪: U+1F42A ~ "Eine Frage, 42 Antworten" (1 Question, 42 Answers). He topped this with another HHGTTG -inspired code sample that might not output what you assume it would:

use Encode qw(from_to); my $question = 'The final answer to the ultimate question?'; say 'The answer is: '. from_to($question, 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8');

Another absolute highlight was Lees talk on Moving Mountains With Perl, which featured very little Perl, but great photos (and a very nice prop!)

It was also very nice to chat with old and new friends about Perl, tech, music, travel, politics, home-made tonic water, kids, life, the universe and everything!

YEF / PerlCon

I talked with a lot of people about the future of YEF and how we want to organize future PerlCons (the current one is doing very well, thanks to Andrew). Three days immersion in good Perl vibes finally motivated me to continue those discussions on the YEF venue mailing list. If you're interested in the future of Perl events in Europe, please join the list, post your thoughts and (finally) do some actual work!

One thing I think we should do is to promote our events more to people outside the Perl community (esp. to local hackers). To validate my hunch that we usually have a lot of talks that are not only relevant / interesting to Perl hackers, I analyzed the talks. I put them into 4 categories: Perl, Perl6, other tech, and culture. Then I assigned each talk to one or two of those categories (100% or 50%), erring on the side of Perl, and calculated the percentage of the talk minutes by category.

The results: 40% Perl, 18% Perl 6, and 21% each for other tech and culture.

At least 40% of the talks could be of interest to people who do not primarily care about Perl (and I assume that some of the Perl content can be of interest, too). So maybe we can get out of our echo chamber and promote our events (or at least parts of them) explicitly to non-Perl groups. Hm, and I guess that the inverse is also true: Visit some non-Perl events!

My talks

I did three talks (I did not expect all of them to be accepted, but there were enough talk submissions to open up a second track, so they choose all of them..):

Thanks..

.. to the orgas, speakers, attendees and sponsors!

Also thanks to Lee and EPO for managing the video recordings in the main room and simbabque for macgyver a recording rig in the second room. I'm curious how the videos will turn out...

Looking forward to next year's German Perl Workshop in Erlangen!

Footnotes