Conference Surveys

YAPC::Europe 2010 - 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
• Business Analyst / Information Management
• Evangelist
• Lawyer
• lots of diffeent stuff
• Network admin
• Software Localizer
• System engineer

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:

• Home automation
• Hospitality
• Marine Insurance Broking
• Network management
• Plant Bioinformatics (Agrotech?)
• Tourism

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.

How do you rate your Perl knowledge?

How many previous YAPCs have you attended?

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

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.

• Getting more interested in Ruby and Python

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

• Commit to Perl5 source
• core developer
• core doc patches, Perl 6 development
• expo marketing
• I help organizing perl at perl and non perl events
• I plan to run a conference
• I teach a Perl course for free
• i teach friends
• I try to spread the word of Perl in India
• none
• One of the main organizers of our Perl-Mongers meetings
• Perl Organisations
• Perl::Staff member
• Stackoverflow
• stackoverflow,com
• use Perl on VMS
• usenet! CLPM
• workshops 4 free, @perloneliner twitter
• YEF/TPF/APPP member

YAPC::Europe 2010

Regarding YAPC::Europe 2010 in Pisa, Italy specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

If 'Other' please let us know when

• after attending London Perl Workshop
• After attending the Perl workshops
• After being privately informed about the event by the organizers.
• after convincing my manager to let me go
• after finally doing it
• after IPW 2009 in Pisa
• after reading the workshop program
• After the IPWs
• After winning the quiz I read about on mst's twitter
• At the perl mongers meeting
• I helped organizing the event
• I was invited by the organizers
• It was a convenient location
• Send-a-newbie
• To socialize with fellow core hackers

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 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?

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

• getting away from work for a week, attending courses
• meet some italian mongers I knew from before via irc/mail but never met in person
• Perl 6 Hackathon
• Recruiting people
• Recruiting Perl programmers
• the training courses
• to catch up on the latest Perl developments
• to get increased motivation for working with, and contributing to, the perl community
• to hire
• to learn more about Perl and related
• to meet all others
• to recruit

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

If 'Other' please enter your suggestions

• coffee breaks and lunch
• hospitality of the orgas, Florence tour
• I was the remote speaker ;-)
• it was really well organized
• O'Reilly stand with good prices
• Orzo Bruno
• the auction
• the lightning talks
• The stellar lunch and coffee breaks.

Did you have holiday planned around your conference attendance?

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

If 'Yes', which talks did you miss?

Additional comments:

• A lot
• [several] ... but thanks to the videos, I hope being able to watch most of these, as soon as I have the time.
• dunno anymore. but at Linux Tag in Germany they orgaize the talks in tracks and I think that's a great idea. e.g. testing, perl6, perl internals etc
• I remember there were clashes, but forgot which. Overall, the schedule organization was well done!
• I'd have seen them all if possible.
• Lots... But I understand that not all can be seen
• mainly perl 6 talks which would have been interesting but not needed for my work
• most of Perl6 because I felt Perl6 was taking too long a time from attending a talk to being actually able to use perl6 for more than just fun - and then either being sad because i cannot use the perl6 features in a perl5 production environment or just forgetting about them until perl6's prime time is there.
• It would be really easy if you would put up the talks first, then let people choose what they want to see and then make the schedule ! let us write optimize::schedule and have a killer app !
• No one in particular. Sometimes it was hard finding even one talk that was appealing, other times there were several at a time. Coming to the conference as a team of colleagues, we were able to take simple notes for each other.
• Several
• Talks video footage will sort this out.
• The DBA talk by datacharmer, but I've seen the slides are online
• The extended Git sessions, and others. I'll try to catch up on the videos later.
• Too many to remember.

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.

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

If 'Yes', which speakers?

Additional comments:

• Damian Conway. But of course I have full understanding of the circumstances as well. But you did ask. [Many similar sentiments were echoed by others - Barbie]
• I don't know much about prominent Perl speakers/developers/contributors.
• Myself ;-)
• there are (too) man interesting speakers in our community

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

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

• - How to make things happen with Rakudo Perl 6. - Cook-booking lessons about Perl 6.
• - Packaging & deployment of big apps (Shipwright, et al.) - Upgrading strategies - Coordination with GNU/Linux distros - Perl on the cloud
• - Testing and test suits - High performance real world examples
• A permanent beginner track with the same low level talks given every year. New attendees will benefit from the simple talks and we can develop new speakers with existing content.
• Anything that makes a great talk :)
• Asynchronous coding (POE, AnyEvent, Reflex) and more network stuff
• Code generation - writing Perl which writes Perl. I would love to see the whole tracks dedicated to most known modules of Modern Perl, especially Moose. It's impossible to cover all the issues even during 50 minutes talk, so maybe a bunch of 20 minutes "atomic" talks would do.
• enterprise perl
• GUI
• How to go about learning enough C to get into hacking on perl or An intro to hacking on perl through an example bug fix What the CPAN needs - any obvious gaps in the CPAN that developers could make modules for Test::Aggregate, Test::Class, other advanced testing techniques
• I think the balance was reasonable. A beginners track might be useful.
• I would like to see better speakers ! So the idea of making a speaker's workshop before was a good one.
• I would like to see more on web devel & deploy.
• I'd like to see more humorous lightning talks - Smylers's talk and the talk entitled "chmod -x chmod" were great.
• Javascript and Perl Web design and Perl WebGUI, Bricolage more details about the CMS-es and other applications in Perl
• Keep up the XS/internals talks. I'd like to see some more about deployment of Perl apps and more talks about specific applications written in Perl.
• language design theory
• Migrating from older perl versions (5.8) to newer and how to keep doing that: a migration/update strategy with good reasons which could be presented to "business types". I also enjoyed the non-technical lightning talk about "clarifying tech writing": there should be more like that!
• Modern perl in general, Deployment options also for OS.X + win32, Introduction to Moose, Introduction/Comparison to established templating systems (Mason, TT), introduction to Catalyst
• mod_perl REST, messaging, queues
• mod_perl, web stuff
• Moose core, Perl core, XS for beginners, GUIs(!)
• Moose, Catalyst and Perl API.
• Moose, Catalyst, Dancer and other web application framework.
• Moose, Catalyst, Plack
• More Perl for web developers maybe... Plack, non-Catalyst web frameworks
• more tutorial on perl 6 (beginner level)
• Network, Web
• NLP / Math related topics
• Performance
• Perl 6
• perl core
• Perl6 Modern Perl
• Perl6 and Parrot.
• perlguts, Perl 6
• Presentation of new intresting modules and common usage of perl technologies in real world.
• Real world Perl success stories.
• Some talks that reflect the subtitle of the conference (Renaissance).
• speed optimization parallelization
• Stories from "real life" in companies
• System Administration
• testing and QA
• this year was about right for the talks I saw, but I think more beginner talks would be useful, as we had a lot of new people who have never seen of the basic talks, that speakers later drop in favour of more advance talks.
• Tools done in Perl
• We desperately need a whole beginner's track at YAPC. Only the seasoned developers come to YAPCs; we're missing a great opportunity to draft new talent.
• Web development More talks on the Moose ecosystem
• Win32 modules POSIX

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?