a quick overview of yapc (and my slides)
First off, my slides. Whenever I give a presentation, someone will ask me whether the slides will go online. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. This year, I gave three presentations: one on Git, one on some new email libraries, and one on Rx. The email slides will probably go online soon. I’m not sure the other two will.
It’s great to get feedback on my slides, and of course praise is nice too, and I’d like everyone who can to be able to benefit from whatever explanation I can provide, but sometimes slides just don’t make sense as a PDF online. Very often, the slides are merely visual aids for the spoken content. Without narration, the slides are often less than useful, or even counter-productive.
I would like to get my Git slides online, but it will require that I first record the audio and sync it with presentation. That will require a good bit of work, and I’m not sure when I’ll make the time to do it. (After all, presenting for YAPC earns me free admission and interesting questions. Presenting for SlideShare mostly just gets me notices that someone else has posted spam to the comments.)
So, on to the YAPC recap.
I arrived Saturday with plans to get some beer at the Hofbrauhaus, but it fell through. Instead, we went to Claddagh. I was irritated that I had to order four beers before they actually had any left, and that it was Smithwick’s instead of something local. Still, the service was great and the food was really good. The price was right, too!
Sunday I mostly holed up in my room and worked on slides. In the evening, Dieter and I headed out to the arrival dinner. As usual, it was underwhelming, but it was still nice to see people and have a beer. (Strangely enough, the only local beer I saw at the beer-o-centric Sharp Edge was Hop Devil, which is all I drink at home.)
During the conference proper, I kept busy polishing slides until just before each presentation. I also managed to see a good number of talks, many of which were very good. Josh ben Jore had a good talk on debugging, Jim Brandt spoke about Workflow.pm, Jonathan Swartz spoke about CHI, and there were lots of others. It was also fun to see Dieter’s talk on Dist::Zilla, as it was the first time anyone else gave a talk on something I wrote. (The next day, Chris N. included a lot of App::Cmd in a talk, too.)
The conference dinner at Heinz Field was really good, and speakers got a VIP tour of the stadium, including the locker rooms, control rooms, and so on. I got lots of photos and called my brother to make him jealous. He’s a big Steelers fan.
It was also great to see so many people I hadn’t seen in years. Sungo, especially, had been MIA since Toronto. Lots of people have changed jobs, which was fun to hear about, or lost jobs, which was not.
It was great to see Dieter again and rehash long-dormant in-jokes. (At some point someone asked, “So… I guess you guys know each other?”) Sadly, we did not produce our discussed Perl Filk Concert lightning talk.
Finally, on Wednesday evening, David Golden was in town and stopped by CMU. We had some pizza and beer, and we worked on the Metabase a bit. Only a few code changes were made, but the whole thing was documented some more and is now on the CPAN. Hopefully this will help get momentum back up.
That might be all I have to say about YAPC. It was loads of fun, and I’m looking forward to next year – but I’m definitely going to enjoy having a few months with no slides to think about, too.