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:

• Attorney
• Forensic Database Analyst

Current Job Status:

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:

• Career
• Geolocation
• HR/Recruiting
• Human Resources
• music, culture
• Political Activism / Lobbying
• Religious

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 many previous Perl Conferences have you attended?

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

Do you plan to attend a future Perl event

If no, could you tell us why?

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

• I was particularly disappointed in the lack of diversity among the speakers -- particularly among the "keynote" style speakers. Given that some people spoke more than once, that suggests the organizers aren't casting a wide enough net for speakers or aren't willing to take a chance on new speakers. If next year's speaker list is predominantly white men again, that might be my last YAPC.
• If no, it would be because my company stopped funding it.

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?

• Contribute PRs to CPAN modules and Perl6 Core
• How is StackOverflow not on here?
• i file tickets and pull requests to projects, also #cpan-prc
• twitter

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

When did you decide to come to this conference?

• After being asked to speak
• After I saw a list of topics for presentations
• After we submitted a bid
• As soon as I got a job at a Perl shop
• As soon as the location was announced
• Employer offered to send anyone who wanted to go
• I don't remember but somehow I got to knew about the conference in Orlando last year.
• I was invited by the organizers
• reading about it in few places
• Twitter mention
• Wanted to hire a Perl developer
• was local to me
• when the venue location was announced.

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

• Like but it needs to be better publicized!
• Meh
• mixed feelings; better branding but too generic
• TPC in a search box brings up golf courses before the conference.

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?

What was your motivation for coming?

• community
• compelled at gunpoint
• First time the conf has been easy access for me
• I have family in the area
• Meet Randal L Swartz
• My Husband talked me into it. I also ofcourse wanted to learn more about perl.
• perl community as a whole
• to attend the tutorial sessions
• to keep up with current Perl trends and news.
• trainings
• Zero to perl Sunday workshop

What aspects of the conference do you feel gave value for money?

• Damian Conway
• The Bar and Restaurant Track. :-)

Will you wear the event shirt after The Perl Conference?

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

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

• Concurrency
• Extending perl 5 with new keywords and perl6 with slangs.
• How to implement testing in existing code, particularly for web apps. How to safely modernize old Perl code. Detailed case studies of how Perl is being used in production.
• I hope the beginner track is emphasized as a priority for seeking speakers. I don't mark beginner as something I would prefer, however I recognize that it should be taught. I have tried to give beginner level talk when possible to do my part. I'm happy that the committee gave me two slots so that one could be beginner and one could be what I want to talk about. Perhaps that could be offered explicitly ("presenting a beginner talk will not affect consideration for giving a second talk on the material of your choosing") I bet more people would sign on to give a beginner under those terms.
• I think it would be useful to have scheduled time for ad hoc, "write-in", round table discussions. For example, Will Braswell had an RPerl discussion with several attendees to discuss plans and volunteering. It would have been very nice, after the Moxie talk, to have a chance to discuss it in smaller groups - especially for the porters. One of the most useful ones I've ever attended was at PyOhio a few years back, where someone wrote in a round table to exchange vim tricks and plugins. That would have been nice after Damian's vim tricks talk.
• I'd like to see more polyglot talks like the one on swift. (in the past there have been talks on rust, etc).
• I'd love to see some intro to XS talks -- perhaps a half-day or full-day tutorial even.
• More "I did this" talks that dig into the itch, the code and the problems found and fixed along the way.
• More Perl 5
• More Perl 6 please.
• More practical "the best way to accomplish X in Perl" talks. These were part of the pre- and post-conference tutorials, but I didn't get a chance to attend those. I would prefer some of them be mixed into the main talks.
• More talks about the guts of Perl 5 and Perl 6 so more people are comfortable hacking on them.
• More war stories, aka.. this is what's like to run a 12 factor app handling 100k+ requests a second, etc.
• perl6 topics
• Post Modern Web Development track teaching basics of Catalyst, Dancer, Mojolicious, etc. web design and database connection techniques AND mostly importantly each should provide a simple running web app in each framework for download so we can springboard from that.
• Real war stories from companies that use Perl. Stories of failure.

If a banquet was provided as an additional registration item for about $50, would you attend it?

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.

Would you pay double for The Perl Conference if we could exclude sponsorship advertising?

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?

What area of the US would make it easier for you to attend?

Did you bring a guest with you on your visit to DC that did not attend the conference?