YAPC::Europe 2011 - 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:

Attendees: pie chart

CountDescription
147Responded
138No Response
285Total
51Response Percentage

Age Band:

Age Band: pie chart

CountDescription
0under 20
3020 - 29
7130 - 39
3940 - 49
550 - 59
260 and over

Job Type:

Job Type: pie chart

CountDescription
8CEO/Company Director/Senior Manager
1Non-Technical Manager
14Technical Manager
16Technical Architect/Analyst
79Developer
8Engineer
6SysAdmin
3Student
3Lecturer/Teacher/Trainer
0Human Resources
5Researcher
1Unemployed
3Other

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
  • Software Localizer

Industry:

Industry: pie chart

CountDescription
1Automotive
9Education
3Engineering
9Finance
3Government
35IT Services
45Internet/Web
0Legal
0Logistics
3Media/Entertainment
2Medical/Healthcare
4Property
9Research
3Retail
7Telecommunications
8Travel
2Unemployed
4Other

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:

  • Book Publishing
  • Books
  • Marketing
  • Software Localization

Region:

Region: pie chart

CountDescription
0Latvia
26UK / Ireland
91Western Europa
15Eastern Europa
7Southern Europa
4United States / Canada
4Asia / Australaisa
0South America
0Africa

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?

CountDescription
7Beginner
55Intermediate
83Advanced

How many previous YAPCs have you attended?

CountDescription
39This was my first YAPC
Attended YAPCs12345678910111213total
YAPC::Europe20141911671033541-448
YAPC::NA93121-1-----264
YAPC::Asia41--1--------11
YAPC::Australia / OSDC::Australia3-1----------6
YAPC::Israel / OSDC::Israel1--1---------5
YAPC::Russia52-----------9

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

CountDescription
46Never attended one
Attended Workshops1234567891011total
Austrian Perl Workshop-3411------27
Belgian Perl Workshop343--------20
French Perl Workshop4-12--11---38
German Perl Workshop136221322--1103
Italian Perl Workshop3----1-----9
London Perl Workshop9824232----89
Netherlands Perl Workshop4132-212---58
Nordic Perl Workshop11423211--1-70
Portuguese Perl Workshop31---------5
Ukrainian Perl Workshop221--------9
any American Perl Workshops32--1------12
any Russian Perl Workshops1-2------1-17
Other Perl Workshops3-1--------6

Do you plan to attend a future YAPC/Workshop?

CountDescription
130Yes
15Maybe
2Don't Know
0No

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.

  • I didn't feel like I was taking much out of the conference. I go there mostly to see some of my friends, but it seems I don't get the chance to talk to most of them anyway, as everyone's too busy getting their slides ready and by the attendees dinner it's hard to talk to other people apart from the ones we sit next to.

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

CountDescription
95Yes
51No

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

CountDescription
11Yes
22Maybe
6Don't Know
16No

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

CountDescription
84I'm a CPAN Author
17I'm a CPAN Tester
38I'm a Perl project developer (eg Rakudo, Catalyst, TAP, Padre, etc)
49I have a technical blog (e.g. on blogs.perl, use.perl or a personal blog)
45I use or contribute to PerlMonks or other Perl forums
65I use IRC (e.g. #perl, #yapc, or #london.pm)
45I contribute to Perl mailing lists (e.g. P5P, Perl QA, etc)
11other ...

If 'Other' please enter your area of contribution

  • Co-organize (and attend) YAPC, workshop,PM-meetings, hackathons, social meetings; foundation / being board member of foundations
  • Core hacker
  • donate money
  • GSOC/GCI
  • I'm a perl5 core comitter
  • Jointly provide hosting for blogs.perl.org
  • Lots of contributions to Perl 6 module management stuff
  • organizing Perl workshops in Germany
  • Perl 5 core hacker
  • perl core distribution
  • workshop organizer
  • write articles

YAPC::Europe 2011

Regarding YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga, Latvia specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

CountDescription
80I'm now a regular YAPC::Europe attendee
8After YAPC::Europe 2010 in Pisa
0After joining the Facebook event group
7I was nominated to attend by manager/colleague
13I was recommended to attend by friend/colleague
0After reading an ad in a magazine
13After seeing a link or advert on a Perl specific site
1After seeing a link or advert on a non-Perl site
2After reading an email sent to a mailing list I was in
3After seeing other promotions online/in the press
17other ...

If 'Other', what else helped you decide?

  • after convincing my boss to pay it
  • after knowing that was about to be in Rīga
  • After our PM-Meeting
  • after Riga won in competition for venue
  • after YAPC::Russia
  • After YAPC:EU in Lisbon
  • Andrew Shitov said that if you perl programmer, then you just have to be at such an event
  • Found via Google after determining that my current employer will send people to conferences; I've wanted to get to a YAPC for many years.
  • I only went to see friends I don't get to see otherwise.
  • I was (also) there to do recruiting.
  • I was invited
  • If you are not on irc you do not exist ;)
  • Just because I was curious about it
  • my talk was accepted :)
  • spontaneous recruiting run

Were you a speaker?

CountDescription
67No
24No, but I have spoken before at similar conferences
44Yes, and I have spoken before at similar conferences
11Yes, and it was my first time as 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?

CountDescription
53Yes
15No

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

CountDescription
61Yes
11No
23Ask me later

What was your motivation for coming?

CountDescription
73the list of speakers
69the quality of the talks scheduled
43to be a speaker
102to meet with Perl/project co-contributors
123to socialise with Perl geeks
26to meet Larry Wall
29to meet Damian Conway
85to visit Riga or Latvia
15other ...

If 'Other', what else motivated you to attend?

  • beeeeeeer
  • drinkers.pm meeting
  • find out about Perl related things and all the new shiny modules etc.
  • General good impressions of YAPC from online participation in Perl community
  • once at YAPC - allways at YAPC
  • recruiting
  • recruiting Perl developers
  • Seeing some friends I don't get to see otherwise.
  • Support the Community
  • to have FUN (in general) and get new ideas and feedback on my work
  • To have good time and that worked out well, thank you
  • to organise by directly speaking to people
  • to see prevailing Perl trends
  • to understand the Perl ecosystem
  • to write robust code

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

CountDescription
138the talks / speakers
4the conference bag
56the tshirt
12the job fair
84the conference dinner
83the conference venue
95the city of Riga
47the hallway track
106the attendees
4other ...

If 'Other', what else did you think was value for money?

  • drinkers.pm meeting
  • few of the talks
  • hands down: the P.I.M.P t-shirt
  • meeting Perl people
  • the wifi

Did you have holiday planned around your conference attendance?

CountDescription
62I came just for the conference
17several days before only
181 day before only
29several days before and after
111 day after only
10several days after only

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

CountDescription
84Yes
60No

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.

CountDescription
13Mojolicious - A New Hope by Marcus Ramberg
12bending semantics with 5.14 by Zefram
12Plack basics - website best practices by Leo Lapworth
8Introduction to Code Coverage by Paul Johnson
8SSH Can Do That? Tips for Working More Productively with Remote Servers by Smylers
7How I learned to stop worrying and love threads by Leon Timmermans
7Perl 6 Lists, Arrays, and Hashes vivified: lazy, infinite, flat, slurpy, typed, bound, and LoL'd by Patrick Michaud
6Dancing into Web Development by Andrew Solomon
5Cool, bonsai, cool - An introduction to ElasticSearch by Clinton Gormley
5Euclid, Socrates and Mill - Quality in Documentation by Matt S Trout
5Extending Perl with functional macros by Rolf Langsdorf
5How not to screw up your business application by Carl Mäsak
5Perlude: a taste of haskell in perl by marc chantreux
5State of the Parrot by Christoph Otto
5Webscraping by example by Max Maischein
5XML::Compile::SOAP by Mark Overmeer
4Adventures in Marketing by Mark Keating
4Camps: Better web development environments by Jon Jensen
4DBIx::DataModel in detail by Laurent Dami
4Dependency Injection - Introduction by Zbigniew Lukasiak
4Encryption on the Web for everyone by Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ
4HTML5: What is is, what it isn't, and should you use it? by Mallory van Achterberg
4I <3 my Community by Mark Keating
4Introduction to writing readable and maintainable Perl by Alex Balhatchet
4Medieval Perl: charting the history of medieval texts with a modern language by Tara Andrews
4Modern Perl - getting there from here by Anthony Webster
4Monkey-patching, subclassing, and accidental overriding by Aaron Crane
4Rakudo Evolved: speed, feedback and hackability by Jonathan Worthington
4Terms of endearment - the ElasticSearch query language explained by Clinton Gormley
4use types by Reini Urban
3Dependency Injection and TDD by Silvano Luciani
3Feel like I'm fixing to test - talk by Thomas Klausner
3Getting the most out of YAPC by brian d foy
3Git::CPAN::Hook - Managing CPAN installations with Git by Philippe Bruhat
3Go language for Perl programmers by Andrew Shitov
3Hg vs. Git by Herbert Breunung
3Introduction to the Dancer web application framework by Job van Achterberg
3Making data dance by Carl Mäsak
3Mostly lazy DBIx::Class testing by Chisel Wright
3Perl Training by Dave Cross
3Postmodern Module Packaging by Ingy döt Net
3Redis - A key/value store by David Leadbeater
3Replacing Relational DB with Redis: a Case Study by Anton Berezin
3Running legacy mod_perl with Plack by Peter Makholm
3Smoking The Onion - Tales of CPAN Testers by Barbie
3Spark - Seriously Awesome Form Handling by James Laver
3why time is difficult by Zefram
2ActiveState, Perl and the Cloud by Ingy döt Net
2Benchmark::Perl::Formance for the masses by Steffen Schwigon
2Debugging Perl 6 Grammars by Jonathan Worthington
2Demystify file system hierarchy for deployments by Jozef Kutej
2Extended meta-data on backpan/cpan by Mark Overmeer
2Git::Repository - Controling Git from Perl by Philippe Bruhat
2Hack For Japan by Yusuke Kawasaki
2How CPAN Testers helped me improve my module by Léon Brocard
2Sanitizing HTML 5 with Perl 5 by Uwe Voelker
2TAP Juggling by Steffen Schwigon
2Tapper test scheduling by Maik Hentsche
2The Perl Foundation: Year in Review by Karen Pauley
2The State of the Acmeism by Ingy döt Net
2What good Perl editors should be able by Herbert Breunung
2Writing Plugins for Padre, the Perl IDE by Gabor Szabo
1App::TimeTracker, Metaprogramming & Method Modifiers by Thomas Klausner
1E-Commerce usability and how to test it by Jure Kodzoman
1Object-Oriented Programming in Perl 6 (Teaching Class) by Jonathan Worthington
1Oriental Perl for Enterprise by Yusuke Kawasaki
1Roman numbers and Perl by Jean Forget
1The Business Aware Programmer by Abigail
1The Legend of Data::Query - a LINQ's awakening by Matt S Trout
1The SNMP::Class library by Athanasios Douitsis
1working with databases by Laurent Dami

Additional comments:

  • Almost all. I did too many other things... No clashed in schedule, it was just me.
  • Don't remember, not that important.
  • I can't remember :)
  • I generally wanted to see two of the four talks in every time slot.
  • I get up late, so the my personal schedule does not agree with the conference schedule. :)
  • I mostly missed talks because they were in the secondary rooms despite having more people interested in them then the ones in the main room (and the room would get to the point of not having more seats available).
  • I spoke to the people whose talks I missed :)
  • I was only be able to tick "No", because the organizers were friendly enough to do some re-scheduling
  • Many of the web devel talks where scheduled in the same time slot
  • Missed Damian and Larry. Keynotes should not be given in the morning when the average perler is thinking about leaving his/her bed.
  • Not that many in fact, the schedule was pretty much well layed-out for me
  • Several talks related to similar topics were happening at the same time. Other talks on related topics were spread on different days/rooms instead of being in a track (web topics, functional programing topic). I also missed two talks I wanted to see because they clashed with mine. :-) Or because I was too busy polishing my own slides. :-( Also, the more tracks, the more clashes will happen. Having a topic per track should help avoid them.
  • Too many interesting talks
  • too many to count
  • Too many, as usual.
  • Some web-development or sysadmin related talks happened at the same time (e.g. tuesday at 16:10 Plack, Mojolicius and webscraping at the same time, tuesday at 16:55 talks about ssh and snmp at the same time)
  • There were a few, but the only one that particularly sticks in my mind is the "getting the most from YAPC" intro session on Monday morning. Not that I expected it to have anything all that surprising, but it would have been nice to see whether there were any tips unique to YAPC vs. other conferences.

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

CountDescription
44Yes
91No

If 'Yes', which speakers?

CountDescription
9Mark-Jason Dominus
8Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
6Adam Kennedy
6Paul Fenwick
4Allison Randal
4Audrey Tang
4chromatic
4Curtis "Ovid" Poe
4Randal Schwartz
4Ricardo Signes
3Michael Schwern
3Piers Cawley
2Chia-liang Kao (高嘉良)
2Dave Rolsky
2Jos Boumans
2Marty Pauley
2Tim Bunce
2Tom Christiansen
1Andreas J. König
1Andy Wardley
1Ash Berlin
1Chris Prather
1Daisuke Maki
1Dave Mitchell
1David Wheeler
1Greg McCarroll
1Jonathan Rockway
1Jon Orwant
1Josh McAdams
1Moritz Lenz
1Sebastian Riedel
1Stevan Little
1劉康民 (GUGOD)
1Yves Orton
1Zahatski Aliaksandr

Additional comments:

  • It'd be nice to start seeing "ambassador" talks from non-Perl folk, who come specifically to hit us on the head with what the other cool kids are doing, but which Perl & the community are missing out on (due to inertia, not-invented-here syndrome, etc).
  • I would like to have heard more from the Moose's mouth
  • More non-European speakers, e.g. miyagawa
  • people who are *not* Perl programmers
  • So many CPAN authors.. :)
  • Flute template talk

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

CountDescription
2More beginner level talks
19More intermediate level talks
32More advanced level talks
84It's about right
7No preference

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

  • - exception handling - documentation on intermediate level, more documentation "strategy", not just a POD intro
  • deployment web development frameworks perl 6 modern perl
  • Email clients Web browser clients Anti-virus and "bad stuff" protection
  • GUI, HOP, mathematical related
  • hmm, BOFs (birds-of-feather sessions) seem to have been dropped, yes? I'm presuming there must have been some conscious decision about this (or was it perhaps lack of space at the venue?) Either way it'd be nice if they came back...
  • HTML5, Javascript, JQuery
  • I don't think any key topics were missed.
  • I'd like to see fewer talks about Moose and so-called "modern" (read: bloated, complex to deploy and install) Perl.
  • I'd like to see more amusing talks. A lot were quite dry and while useful, the days are long enough to warrant more amusement to keep people perky. Also, I'd like to see less talks on getting started with Dancer. There seemed to be a lot of them this year.
  • I'd like to see more talks about hard, technical subjects. Some of the entertainment-heavy talks are fun and all, but I'd appreciate if I could still learn a bit more at YAPCs. But then again, I'm a veteran.
  • I'd like to see some talks on subjects not necessarily Perl-related.
  • Introduction to Perl internals
  • Introduction to XS
  • Large scale design, data crunching, algorithms
  • Moose
  • more about perl internals, perl in perl, how to help/join the core
  • more end-user personal experiences, because non-developers need to learn how other people work.
  • More on new core features
  • More on working solutions rather than presenting "alpha" software (suggestion: make a separate "work-in-progress" track".
  • more Perl 6 talks
  • more sysadmin stuff like Smylers SSH talk
  • More sysadmin topics, scripting.
  • more talks about modernising core Perl
  • More talks centered on the current popular CPAN modules on the Web and web frameworks category
  • No, but both beginner and advanced tracks are very helpful. And I noticed the ssh talk was one of the best-attended -- a non-Perl talk. So nothing wrong with some of that distantly-related stuff that helps people.
  • No, just cool new stuff
  • Not as many core talks (e.g. there were several talks on how to bend the perl5 syntax) would be great. While it's fun to listen to and see what can possibly be done with Perl, it doesn't add any business value to most projects.
  • perl6 objects, how write module on perl6, more oractice
  • perlguts, guts guts tasty guts
  • repeatable environment builds and keeping your application stable through CPAN/perl version changes
  • some more technical talks would have been nice
  • Talks on how companies use Perl - stories from the trenches.
  • Would like to see some comparison talks, with similar modules, highlighting pros and cons of each.
  • YAPC 2012 should try to have a "Beginners Track" again (but I'm one of the organizers anyway)

How do you rate the conference?

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

Choices 1 2 3 4 5
Newsletters/Updates 81 57 4 - -
Web site 82 59 4 - -
Registration process 93 42 7 2 -
Directions/Maps 92 45 6 1 -
Content of the talks 53 79 12 - -
Schedule efficiency 69 62 13 1 -
BOFs 8 14 7 6 -
Social events 67 65 12 1 -
Parking 8 3 1 - -
Facilities 75 53 5 1 -
Food service 86 48 9 2 -
Accommodation 86 43 5 - -
Staff 112 31 1 - -
Overall experience 106 38 2 - -
Value for price 117 23 - - -

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:

CountFee
4€ 1000
1€ 800
1€ 600
9€ 500
2€ 400
3€ 350
12€ 300
3€ 299
3€ 250
5€ 200
1€ 175
2€ 160
5€ 150
1€ 120
3€ 100
1€ ??

Standard Rate:

CountFee
2€ 300
1€ 200-300
6€ 200
2€ 199
11€ 150
1€ 125
4€ 120
47€ 100
6€ 99
1€ 80
2€ 75
3€ 70
1€ 50

Concession Rate:

CountFee
7€ 100
1€ 79
2€ 75
1€ 70
26€ 50
1€ 49
1€ 45
2€ 40
3€ 30
3€ 25
2€ 20
1€ 15
2€ 10
1€ 1

How did you pay for the conference fee?

CountDescription
39N/A - I was a speaker
3N/A - I was a sponsor
49My company paid
45I paid out of my own pocket
0I wasn't able to attend