The Perl Conference (formerly known as YAPC) in Amsterdam is getting closer. Oh, sure, it’s not imminent, but in five months time it will all be over. And there’s a lot to get done in those five months. I’m glad I’m not one of the organisers.

But there is something that I need to get organised over the next couple of months. It looks likely that there will be training courses running before or after the main conference and, assuming that happens, I’d like to be running one of those courses.

Last year, the “Modern Web Development with Perl” course that I ran in Cluj-Napoca seemed to be very successful (it certainly had the most attendees of any course I’ve run alongside a YAPC) and I think that was down to two factors:

We planned and announced the course nice and early. I asked you what course I should run.

I’m not doing to mess with a successful formula, so I’m going to take the same approach this year. Consider this my “what course should I run?” post.

This is how it will work. In this post I’ll make a few suggestions of courses. We can discuss them in the comments and you can add your own suggestions. In a few weeks time, I’ll pull out the most popular suggestions and put it to a public vote. I’ll run the course that gets the most votes.

So what courses could I run?

There are courses that I’ve run many times and that would only need light updating. I have a course on DBIx::Class (I ran that in Granada in 2015), one on Moose and one on testing. I’d be happy to do any of those.

At the LPW last year, I ran a “Modern Perl Update” session which seemed to go down pretty well. I went through the last few Perl releases and explained the new and changed features. It was only a couple of hours long, but I could expand it. Perhaps I could add some stuff about CPAN modules that people don’t seem to know about.

I could re-run the Dancer course from last year. In a day, the class went from nothing to writing a functional and useful Dancer application. Perhaps there’s a big enough audience to do that again.

Or, perhaps, some kind of extension to last year’s course. I don’t mean that you would need to have done the previous course in order to find it useful, but maybe something about integrating Perl web tools with a modern web development toolkit. Using Angular or React as the front end to a Perl backend. Or how about writing APIs in Perl?

I’ll should point out that there are some things that I’m not the right person to teach. Perl 6 is top of that list. Not only have I not had the time to really explore Perl 6 yet, but given that Damian Conway is going to be at the conference and I fully expect him to clean up on the Perl 6 training front.

So there are half a dozen suggestions. What do you think? Are you coming to Amsterdam? Would you (or your company) pay extra for a training course? What course would you like to see?

Let me know your thoughts.

Also published on Medium.