Conference Surveys

YAPC::Europe 2009 - Survey Results

Introduction

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.

Demographics

These questions will help us understand who our attendees are.

Attendees:

Age Band:

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:

• Bureaucrat
• Consultant Automation & Security
• Freelance Software Localizer
• IT Contractor
• Partner
• software consultant
• Technology Evangelist
• Testleader
• web 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:

• Bioinformatics
• Energy/Oil
• finance, automotive, telco
• Insurance
• Science
• semiconductor industry
• Various
• wood manufacture

Region:

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

The Perl Community, YAPCs & Workshops

These questions are designed to help us understand our attendees level of involvement in the Perl community. Are we encouraging new people into the Perl Community, how are people getting involved with the community, can we do things better to make it easier and more exciting to be involved with the community?

How do you rate your Perl knowledge?

How many previous YAPCs have you attended?

The following matrix lists, for each conference, how many times an attendee has attended a particular conference, with the total number of appearances of each.

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

The following matrix lists, for each workshop, how many times an attendee has attended a particular workshop, with the total number of appearances of each.

Do you plan to attend a future YAPC/Workshop?

If no, could you tell us why?

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

• Depends on practical reasons like availability during those dates, how far it will be held, etc.
• I didn't say I would not be interested or able, the question is "Do you plan ...". Please make sure you understand the question you are asking.
• I learn the skills as I need them, as a contractor time is money and workshops for skills that aren't relevent to me aren't worth attending.
• If there's another YAPC here in Portugal, I'll probably attend it. Flying to YAPC in other countries and getting hosted in Hotels is too expensive.
• Lack of acquaintaces in the community.

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?

If 'Other' please enter your area of contribution

• Added something to someones CPAN module
• developing using Perl
• enhancing Perl in portugues IT industry
• founding member of several Perl organisations
• german perl community, wxperl
• give trainings
• Have contributed with allegedly useful input to P6 internals, got a commit bit and will attempt to do a bit more.
• I contribute in the name of my company, with sponsorship in some Perl meetings, when possible.
• I help my fellow developer colleagues to contribute and my company to do so.
• I organise, run and encourage conferences
• I submit patches for perl5 (have commit bit)
• I used to ship the sodding thing. (Yes, that's what it feels like by the time it shippable)
• I was a manual CPAN Tester :)
• I'm a pumpkin
• I'm noob! I just ask silly questions
• I'm now running the Secret Mission that Damian gave me
• none
• organise workshops/events
• Organize PM group activities
• Perl community organizer
• Perl evangelist in company
• perldoc translations
• Pushing and pulling the belgian perl community :-)
• Sponsoring YAPC's, workshops, Perl Monger meetings, hackathons
• TPF grant manager
• TPF, YEF, APPP
• Tweet about perl
• Workshop Organiser

YAPC::Europe 2009

Regarding YAPC::Europe 2009 in Lisbon specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

These questions are used to try and identify areas of the conference that did and didn't work, with the aim of giving future organisers an opportunity to improve on all aspects of the conferences experience.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

If 'Other' please let us know when

• A friend suggested to me
• after being told by a friend
• After evdb++ volunteered someone to cover the expenses for me
• after getting my talk accepted !
• after my 1st French FPW
• after NPW 2009
• After YAPC::Europe::2006 in Vienna
• Cog asked me nicely to come
• get enough money
• Have wanted to go for a couple of years, but never had the time/money before.
• Held in Lisbon, our hometown it was easy.
• hint of colleague
• I was organizing the bloody thing! :-)
• I'm a fanboy of Jose Castro.
• I've been to every YAPC::Europe. I don't intend to stop.
• Jose invited me to speak
• Lisbon.pm meeting
• My colleague was at a few YAPCes
• On perlmonks
• organizer
• shorttime intuition
• wanted to visit international YAPC for a while
• When I back back to Perl in 2009

Were you a speaker?

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

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

What was your motivation for coming?

If 'Other' please let us know your motivation for coming

• (it seems to be the only way I meet them face to face each year)
• because it's in my Country (Portugal) and City (Lisbon)
• cog asked me to come
• help Alberto
• increase my knowledge
• invitation by conference organizers
• just curious
• keep in touch with new perl developments
• learn something
• learning
• learning more about Perl, and of course meeting some of it's celebrities
• My company always had a strong perl team.
• Needed to get away from "real work" for a few days :)
• networking
• organizer
• Perl 6 training
• the fact that I was organizing it
• The subjects
• to be at the YAPC
• to be inspired
• To get an update on Perl6
• to get community stuff i've put off for far too long done; to help and volunteer people
• To have a wonderful holiday and so I did
• to learn a bit more about Perl
• to learn more :)
• to meet Barbie ;)
• to see JT Smith again

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

If 'Other' please enter your suggestions

• coffee breaks
• coffee breaks and lunches
• food and drink!
• food. lots of food. Joana++
• I also had a training session to get me up to speed and allow me to understand the rest of the conference
• Jesse Vincent
• knowledge
• lunch and snacks
• Matt S Trout free workshop on the Thursday
• Meeting perl 6 development team
• Pastéis de Nata
• Please note; Couldn't attend conference dinner
• reaffirmation, belonging
• some of the talks
• speakers diner, the holiday, a lot of things around Lisbon
• The coffee break food! And the water bottles!
• the food
• the o'reilly stand
• The overall experience, mood and interesting people/talks
• the pastries XD
• the quiz
• the theme of the conference, Corporate Perl
• Training sessions
• wait.. there was a conference bag?
• wifi, conf refreshment, book on sale

Did you have holiday planned around your conference attendance?

Were there any talks you want to see, but missed due to clashes in the schedule?

If 'Yes', which talks did you miss?

There are always conflicts in the schedule, as it's difficult to know what everyone would like to see. However, if you could list a few talks that you missed, it would give speakers an idea whether it would be worth updating their talks for furture events.

Additional comments:

• all
• All talks outside of the Corporate Perl room because I had to do the filming of that room, and the introduction of the speakers, and keeping track of the time left for the speakers, and helping out the organizers.
• As I am a beginner, I stuck mainly to that track, but I would have liked to also have attended others
• I actually have forgotten now, but I know there was one I wanted to see while I was speaking, and another I wanted to see was the one Brian D Foy gave, but I got busy in the hallway track and missed it.
• I don't remember actually :-)
• many of them
• Not one but many!! Don't make me list them... :$
• you did quite well. wanted to see some speakers which had same time slot. it's ok.
• Too many to list ... but I hope to catch up with the slides.
• Looking down the schedule in most slots I've "starred" 2-3 of the 4 talks... In particular I missed Ovid and Paul Fenwick, due to speaking in the same timeslot... hey ho.
• missed several talks that were before 10am because I overslept *orz*;
• Monday 16-17:00
• Probably the main reason is not a clashe, but absence of printed schedule. It was very unexpected. A lot of speakers didn't leave space for questions, so there was no time to smoke, figure out room you need next and recall which track you wanted to visit more.
  When schedule was changed, online version was not updated asap.
• Quite a few - can't remember now. But would not be problem if we could download all afterwards I suppose...
• Several. Wish there was a bigger effort on recording the sessions on video.
• It looks like i wanted to see a lot of talks on the first day, while the later days weren't as interesting to me.
• PDL

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

If 'Yes', which speakers?

Additional comments:

• Don't know enough about the PERL community yet to point out any.

(*) These speakers were actually in attendance in Lisbon :)

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

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

• * anything related to the moose ecosystem, especially anything that isn't a beginners tutorial
  * lowlevel hacks, crazy xs shit, syntax hackery, general core-level topics, etc.
• * parallel and distributed programming
  * syntax analysis
  * testing
  * domain specific languages
• * Writing and using grammars with the Perl6/Rakudo/Parrot toolchain.
  * How to use different Parrot languages together.
  * Hackathons for beginners to learn participating in Parrot/Rakudo.
• A Community track / tag / talks, where we could discuss specifically about the community, policies, and plans.
• A Guide to Git
• about teaching perl, security
• Advanced REST
  POE
• bioinformatics
• catalyst
• catalyst/moose
• Event driven systems (e.g: POE), generalist architechture design of information services (BI processes, workflows, etc.), integrationof common modules (e.g: mixing POE and Moose, or POE and Catalyst), and tons and tons of conferences on Perl 6 and why the logo looks like an euro coin with bfly wings.
• Event-driven programming, concurrency
• Full, complete, end-user applications written in Perl
  Perl Success Stories
  Marketing Perl
• Getting rid of legacy Perl practices (including obsolete CPAN modules)
• Have an additional session of lightning talks where people can register for the talks on the day.
  Consider a later start on the day after the dinner.
• High performance systems. More talks like "how we built large system X".
• I would like to hear Martin Fowler at a YAPC.
• I'd like to see a track called "Intermediate Perl" at the next YAPC::EU.
  It could follow from this year's beginner's track.
• Implementation of Catalyst/Moose/DBIx::Class in a long-term, large-scale systems.
• Low-level (parser, grammar) information - talks from the trenches
• Modern Perl topics: advanced Moose, HTTP::Engine, AnyEvent, advanced regexes, TryCatch, Devel::Declare-based things etc.
• mod_perl
• More "here's a cool app I developed using Perl" maybe?
  Otherwise, it's about right (it's what the people who wanted to submit talks want to talk about, so it ends up being more or less right by default I think).
• More Devel::Declare and Moose talks, that's where the hot stuff in Perl is happening right now.
• more GUI
• More in depth, usable tecniques that can be used everday: websites, systems management, IT organisations management, more discussion of higher level techniques, Data Structures, or producing mulit file/module programs and scirpts
• More on Catalyst, Templating Modules compared (Mason, TT...), Perl used especially within SysAdmin Context, how to write better modularized and maintainable Code, Perl5 to Perl6 migration paths,...
• More on suggested best practices and standardisation.
• more Perl 6
• More XS talks
• Natural language processing for large scale amounts of data.
• No. "That's all I have to say about that."
• Perl 6
• Perl intro to developers from other languages.
• Perl6
• practical Perl 6
• Soft skills
• sysadmin-oriented talks: scripting, deployment, maintenance...
• The beginners talks are quite great this year. I still expect that there are many beginnner/intermediate perl programmers out there which might come to a conference to get new impressions of perl. We can do a lot right while evangelizing perl 6 out in the it world... Maybe more some "cookbook" style sessions...
• the distribution is right, just a little bit more advanced
• The Perl6 talks were at a lower level than before - would have liked some more in depth talks
• Things beyond Perl, e.g. SCM, "Best Practices", Security, other languages compared to/or integrated with Perl.
• Topics that can attract attendees/speakers from outside the Perl community.
• What the roadmap is for future releases, including dates.
  Perl 6/Parrot/Rakudo (whatever) multi core support
• XML
• Yes. Developing web applications with Perl is a personal favorite (and I think that's one key area to enforce the notion that Perl is very much alive, thank you). .

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

The Conference Fee

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:

How did you pay for the conference fee?

The following 2 questions are for student attendee only

Do you feel the student rate was helpful in your coming to the conference?

Would you have come to the conference if there was no student rate?