Conference Surveys

The following survey results are a simple presentation of the raw data. No attempt has been made to analyse the data and compare with previous years. See forthcoming PDFs for more in depth analysis.

Click on pie charts to view larger image version.

These questions will help us understand who our attendees are.

Attendees:

Age Band:

Gender:

Although this question is optional, with your help we would like to monitor changes in attendance over time.

Job Type:

If your position covers many roles, please base this on your most senior responsibility. Also base this on the role you perform, rather than your job title. For example, a 'QA Developer' would be a 'Developer' role, and 'Information Manager' would a Manager role (Technical or Non-Technical depending upon your responsibilites)

If 'Other' please enter your professional job role or title:

• Consultant
• Junior Cyber Security Analyst
• Selfemployed
• SR. SW Engineer
• Technical Team Manager + Perl Developer

Industry:

If you or your company undertake work within mulitple industry sectors, please select the primary one you are currently working within.

If 'Other' please enter your industry sector:

• Contracting
• IT Consulting
• Marketing
• RealEstate

Region:

Please note this is the region you were a resident in, prior to attending the conference.

These questions are designed to help us understand our attendees level of involvement in the Perl community.

How do you rate your Perl knowledge?

How long have you been programming in Perl?

How many previous Perl Conferences have you attended?

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

Do you plan to attend a future TPC/Workshop?

If no, could you tell us why?

Particularly if this is your first Perl Conference, we would like to understand why you would not be able or interested in attending another event like it.

• Unlikely to make the trip just for a Europe perl conference.
• Very good talks were mixed with not so good ones.

Are you a member of a local Perl Mongers user group?

If not, do you plan to find one or start one?

What other areas of the Perl Community do you contribute to?

• CPAN PRC
• I am a perl5 core developer
• I participate in the Pull Request Challenge
• I wrote a few P6 modules.
• i'm a core developer
• modules.perl6.org author
• Perl6 module developer
• Perl6 modules author
• Quora, Linkedin
• Release Manager
• should find more time to contribute
• started a local Mongers group
• Train new colleagues in programming

Several professional trainers attend Perl Conference and provide their courses before and/or after the regular conference. The following questions would help them tailor their courses to better suit the needs of attendees.

Would you be interested in attending training courses either before or after a Perl Conference?

Would you prefer the training courses to be before or after the main conference?

How much would you expect to pay for a training course at The Perl Conference?

Are there any particular subjects that you would like to see in a Perl Conference training course?

• -
• - advanced DBIx::Class - advanced Web frameworks, e.g. for like Catalyst, Dancer2, Mojolicious
• * API design * Becoming a RegExp Expert * Moose Expert
• 121 Code review sessions.
• A reasonable early announcement (before booking Hotel and Planes/Trains etc.). What was offered this year was great and if I had the time (knew early enough) I'd loved to attend Damains guide for impressive presentations.
• Advanced AnyEvent and Mojolicious courses
• Advanced Perl training, but focussed on Perl itself, not modules. E.g. encoding (utf-8 etc); how Perl stores and uses variables; knowledge of Perl internals so that I can optimise programs better etc
• Basic CRUD API service in Perl6, I think it would encourage its usage.
• CPAN distribution authoring. MOP Benchmarking / Profiling & make perl programs faster
• Creating a module for CPAN
• example: using - Dancer2 in combination with SSL/authentication/security
• Getting started with CPAN module authorship.
• How to do productive things in Perl! How to successfully finish projects and get the job done. Not playing with yet another new framework, cool tool, or such things.
• Mojolicious, Moose, Dancer, Advance Perl
• Parallel programming Exception and error handling MoarVM development introduction
• Perl 6 Presentation techniques Make modules for CPAN
• Perl 6
• Perl6 advanced topics like concurrency. Topics in this video are very good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqhLWgvIbz0&t=3069s&list=PLDIpeI4UPjXa6BOpZwNc9AEFiH6FxhMiy&index=2
• perl6 stuff, grammars, promises, etc.
• Presentation Skills a "how to avoid common pitfalls" : - unicode encoding - HTML / JavaScript escaping
• Presentation skills (preferably with Damian), Perl 6, modern Perl, security related stuff.
• Rakudo Concurrency/Parallelism
• Several 101 courses to get highlights, followed by a more in depth course on same subject. So both new and not so new can follow their own course(s).
• Speaker training
• Testing, Presenting
• Using perl to develop "web scale" (scalable) applications. NB: 300 Euros was a daily price. The price field is a bit meaningless without a duration/per day specification.
• XS, Perl internals
• Yes, it should be more like Asia guys doing. Geek festival. More topics related to the different areas of the IT (maybe implemented in Perl). I value a lot presentations about some problem solving stuff.

What should we offer to entice new Perl developers to attend the conference?

• -
• A beginner's track with a workshop to get started a professional Perl installation, e.g. local::lib with upgradable CPAN rather than system Perl.
• A beginners track? Discounts for first attendance (funded by increasing the price for subsequent attendances)? Beginners Q and A session where anything goes, either run by multiple experienced perl developers, or with the entire audience contributing answers?
• A CPAN account registration and connecting them to a senior guiding developer to bring their potential code into shape and uploaded to CPAN. Though, finding mentors that would go through such a mini-2h-hackathon with them needs some organisation effort, of course...
• A tutorial track, cool t-shirts, ... and simply attention. Keep newbie worries in mind at all times.
• Beginners track.
• Courses... tutorials... demo projects
• Database programming with Perl Systems Administration Automation with Perl Responsible Web-Sites with Perl (I would book such a one, too) Forensics with Perl Penetration Testing with Perl Attract new people to Perl Conferences nowadays needs to offer solutions for they daily questions and problems. Unless such an offer, they'll join after they decided to using Perl.
• free tickets
• From Zero to Perl
• Intro to Perl 6 Hands on Web framework( Dancer/Catalyst/Mojolicous ) course.
• Just start to invite everybody. Its a good way to look how other communities doing this. I really like how Ruby community talks, they have a lot of presentations not related to Ruby at all. Like patterns/refactoring/DevOps/... so on so forth.
• More Mojolicious talks
• Perl training/workshops at same time with lecture so those who prefer coding versus listening can choose these. This also would be more beneficial for companies send coders to conference.
• Release conference materials (videos, mainly) to public channels. (youtube + @other_sites)
• Short hands-on workshops?
• Super good speakers Open Source community speakers a "Free" course on Perl5 and / or Perl5
• the most important thing for perl is to let new developers have a good feeling using perl. They shouldn't think about "is this a language for me, for the future, to get things done". They need to be sure perl is good and there is a future - to work productive with a language. * mark them as Newbies (different Badge, Button, etc.) * bring all with less than 2 years of perl experience (or younger than 21, or conference 1st timer) on stage during conference opening, ask questions, tell them orga team is happy have them here * experienced developers should be encouraged to approach to them for a smalltalk to get in contact * Talk about all planned things or programs in advance!
• Wifi Interesting keynote speakers Training Hackathon Good food and drinks Wiki filled with information about city around venue
• Workshops, broad range of talks
• Would be nice if relative new people could attend course(s) to get better understanding of How To use Perl in a proper way. Don't show alllll the possibilities, but the best way of using it/ learning it themselves.

Regarding The Perl Conference in Amsterdam 2017 specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

• #blamemartijn
• #perl6 irc channel
• After colleagues went to Cluj
• After YAPC in Sofia, Bulgaria in 2014
• Always wanted to go, and I live in the Netherlands, so it was a good chance
• i am the main organiser
• I chose to attend as part of a contingent from my company
• I wanted to give a talk
• I was invited to speak
• spontaneous choice
• Very close to home
• was time to visit again
• Wendy told me wrt. Call for Paper
• When I heard it was in Amsterdam - nice and close
• When I realised it coincided with sha2017
• When I was invited
• when told I'd by manager I'd be allowed to go

How do you feel about renaming "YAPC" to "The Perl Conference"?

• I plan to call it YAPC to people in the know. it's easier.
• i prefer the "GLOBAL" branding... the Perl Conference in <city name> ... drop NA and drop EU - many of us travel the world and stops splitting it in regions
• I prefer YAPC, but am okay with it.
• Some Perl Exocicity is dissapearing trying to mimic mainstream
• to me personaly it's ok, for newbees it's better
• To sell it better: The Perl Conference Europe / The European Perl Conference, but other than that: It doesn't matter to me

Were you a speaker?

Note that "similar conferences" includes other Perl Conferences, as well as Linux, Open Source or large technical events such as workshops.

If you were a speaker, would you have been able to attend if you hadn't been speaking?

If you weren't a speaker, would you consider speaking at a future conference?

Were there any speakers not present, who you would like to have seen at the conference?

If 'Yes', which speakers?

• - Sebastian Riedel - Karen Etheridge - Andreas König
• Barbie
• Dave Cross - he is too funny in his presentation style
• David Golden Toby Inkster
• flora
• Gabor Szabo, not really sure if he is a speaker.
• Joel Berger, Sebastian Riedel.
• Johnathan Worthington
• Jonathan Worthington
• Jonathan Worthington especially Also would like here more talks from perl 6 developers / book writers moritz, zoffix, liz, etc who know the language very well.
• Karen Etheridge Jonathan Worthington Peter ribasushi Rabbitson Randal Schwartz Timo Paulsen Carl Masak Tadeausz Sosnierz
• Marc Lehmann Florian Ragwitz
• Mark Jason Dominus
• Mark Jason Dominus (mjd)
• Mark Jason Dominus, Moritz Lenz
• Probably several who might have travel/scheduling issues, like Paul Fenwick or Mark-Jason Dominus.
• Ribasushi, Dave Cross
• Ricardo Signes
• Rik !!!!
• RJBS, Mark-Jason Dominus, Michael Schwern, Tom Christiansen, ...
• Sebastian Riedel
• Shawn Moore (SARTAK)
• Tim Bunce
• Toby Inkster, Neil Bowers, chromatic
• Topic is more important than speaker.
• Uncle Bob Zed A. Shaw Moxie Marlinspike ... Well actually there are a lot of people who are doing IT related talks, and it doesn't matter that its not a Perl related (it actually can be).

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

Are there any topics you would specifically like to see featured?

• - How important Perl projects are organized? Who are the core developers? How is development, testing, bugfixing etc. managed? How to support them? - How to manage a team of software developers in general? Or remotely if it's split across the world? I answered I'd like more beginner level talks because I'd like to invite colleagues which just recently started with Perl or consider doing so. Myself I prefer advanced topics which were enough in the conference.
• A "seperate" beginner level track could attract new people.
• A beginner/repetition/introductory track (half day) at the start of the conference, to bring (conference) newbies more up to speed Instructions/hints for every speaker to introduce themselves and maybe tell a short bit about themselves. This was noted on the papers on the speaker consoles, but a mail could have been more prominent...
• Advanced and playful Perl6 topics. Mixing up various languages like python or c with perl6.
• Another try at the "generic" beginner presentations that were organized a few YAPCs ago
• async, comparisons with other languages (JavaScript, golang), architecture
• common pitfalls - Modern Perl, the way to do things right
• Event-based programming, Mojolicious, Dios
• High-performance Concurrency
• i don't like to see more of the "I implemented another cool feature, framework, etc." talks. More common usage problems and how to solve them; working with big data, networking, parallel programming, IPC
• I really enjoyed the talks that were like a whirlwind tour of some feature, or module. I think some more practical howto type talks would be nice, especially if they are aimed at intermediate users.
• mojolicious, performance, javascript
• Mojolicious, web development
• More in depth talks. The talks in de main area were very good IMHO but a lot of talks in the small room were very "thin" with information. Would have loved to know more about certain subjects.
• More introductory and intermediate Perl 6 and/or "Perl 6 for Perl 5 programmers" type talks
• More on the applications for interesting perl6 features (like junctions, hyper operators, etc.) More on generic-methods and type-classes (cf. haskell). More on interesting areas from other language ecologies (python's pandas, the nodejs build/deploy horrorshow). Less self-congratulation (how many lines of RE to parse perl5?) and more application examples.
• More than topics, it would be fun to have a sort of "live" contribution session: people who are interested can sign up to work in teams on a feature, project, or issue, with at least one experienced developer as team lead.
• Not strictly perl-related but of interest for professionals, like project management, quality management, security, communication, open source in general.
• OOP with low resources/memory usage.
• Ovid's company clearly has a very clean codebase and lots of great ideas/knowledge - I'd love to get more insight into some of their patterns and use-cases - preferably with code available afterwards to study and learn from.
• Parsing, Perl tools (IDE)
• Perl 6
• Perl internals for people with no experience in Perl guts
• Security, DevOps, Clouds, Desgin and Architecture, ...
• Solving Real-World Problems
• The advanced Perl 6 feature talks from the last years could be offered again, regularly, maybe adapted to changes, like for example the grammar debugging features from Jonathan Worthington. Or interacting with foreign C modules, or similar. It would even be ok when others "maintain" them, not necessarily the original author (though with his/her OK abviously).
• the diversity of topics is what makes it interesting to attend, because that broadens you horizons and stimulates your mind. "what are all those slightly crazy people doing with or to perl"
• XS development

How do you rate the conference?

How would you rate your overall satisfaction of the following areas of the conference?

Key:
1 = Very Satisfied
2 = Somewhat satisfied
3 = Somewhat un-satisfied
4 = Very un-satisfied
5 = N/A

In order to help future organisers gauge an appropriate conference fee, how much would you (or your company) have paid for a conference ticket? Feel free to provide an answer for all rates, where corporate rate would be paid for by your company (including a Master Class place), standard rate would be the regular price paid by attendees in paid employment, and lastly the concession rate for anyone who holds proof that they are in fulltime education or are unemployed.

Corporate Rate:

Standard Rate:

Concession Rate:

Would you pay more for a Perl Conference if we could exclude sponsorship advertising?

If so, how much?

How did you pay for the conference fee?

If your employer didn't send you, did they give you time off to attend?

Does distance prevent you from being able to attend some Perl Conferences?