Conference Surveys

London Perl Workshop 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:

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:

• Consultant
• Non-Technical Writer

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:

• Genealogy
• web/scientific research

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 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 dedicated Perl event, we would like to understand why you would not be able or interested in attending another event like it.

• - no responses -

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

• answer perl questions on stackoverflow
• beginners@perl.org
• core committer/contributor
• I annoy people!
• I'm a core hacker; I'm a core committer
• jointly provide blogs.perl.org hosting
• Marketing Chief for tpf
• talkin to pepole about perl

London Perl Workshop 2011

Regarding London Perl Workshop 2011 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?

Were you a speaker?

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

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

• all the previous ones have been excellent
• beer & food
• Beer!
• employment opportunities
• I assumed it would be at least as good as previous years (I was right)
• I was the organiser :)
• recruitment
• the workshop training sessions
• To expand my knowledge and gain perspective by meeting people outside my normal group, and hearing about a language I haven't used (Perl)
• to learn
• to look for other Perl promotion activists

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

If 'Other' please enter your suggestions

• All of it
• food & beer
• free beer and food
• Mark Keating
• Since it was free, I do not understand what "gave value for money" means
• training sessions
• Value for money at a free conference??? It's AWESOME! ;-)
• Value for money? It was free!

Did you have holiday planned around your workshop attendance?

Were there any talks you wanted 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:

• Everything but the Lightning Talks and Matt's Tak speech, the life of an organiser is not a fun one
• Frankly, I'd have liked to see all of the talks. Particularly, the talks in the afternoon all sounded interesting.
• I attended Gabor's Test:: sessions so didn't get to see much else at all. Would like to have seen Tatshuhiko's session on clouding Perl Apps and seen the Dancer session too as well as Abigail's session on Business Aware Developer plus Perl and Unicode by Mike Whitaker, and I missed (my fault) Dave Cross's Modern Perl and Andrew Ford's Creating ePub from LaTeX.
• I take it as given that I'm going to have clashes and miss things I want to see when I go to a conference, but if I could have attended everything I would have
• It was annoying that the Plack talk and workshop were at the same time as they would have complimented each other well.
• I wanted to see Miyagawa's deploying in cloud workshop, but I don;t think it could have been scheduled any better
• I would have been interested in the Perl Testing Workshop and the talk on Plack.
• The Job and Graduate Faire. I had thought it would span 90mins as per the online program.
• The one on contributing to CPAN projects, because I was in the all-day testing workshop
• would have liked to have done more in the training track

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

If 'Yes', which speakers?

Additional comments:

• Larry Wall's presence at the LPW would be amazing!
• moose developers
• of course! :-) There are always good people out there who would be great to see! Is merlyn allowed to travel to the UK?
• some big names from other languages' communities (Ruby/Rails, JS/Node, Haskell) - they could offer a very valuable "view from the outside" and help us Perl developers rethinking anything that we might take for granted but that could benefit from cross-contamination with "other way to do it". many of us probably do this anyways through participating in other languages' online and live events and forums, but hosting nice people from other communities live would be great.
• Someone from the Perl6 effort talking about Perl6. Maybe everyone's heard all about it, but given it was my first perl conference, I haven't.

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future London Perl Workshops?

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

• (no)
• A workshop for people who are well-versed in another language, but fairly new to Perl. Would be good to have some required pre-reading so that it can cover intermediate topics rather than 'Here is the syntax for loops', and to make it last for two workshop sessions rather than just one.
• Building CPAN repositories; Moose;
• Core stuff is always good, but it caters to a smallish audience.
• Corehacking
• DBIx Class Memcached
• DBIx::Class, review of modules from Task::Kensho, TheSchwartz. Generally speaking, I would like to see more "and here's how we used X, Y, and Z to develop XYZ" with both "code" and "architecture" overviews.
• Handling Dates and Times both in Perl and databases.
• How to start my own project with perl. -setting up a directory structure -using a vcs -refactoring the project -promoting the project
• I've been using Perl pretty much full-time for the past 14 years. I've been a PerlMonk for over 10 years, and I've read carefully & followed the advice of experts there and this has made a huge difference to the quality of the code I write, which I'm proud of... BUT! Most of the work I do is procedural rather to OO, and due to my lack of exposure, OO and the terminology used, the techniques you use etc normally seem like Swahili to me. This makes me feel like a total dummy when I'm at LPW and stumble into the wrong talk and have to sit it out with 3/4 of what's going on whizzing past over my head. Sometimes when you're having a good talk with someone and have to admit you don't know OO it can feel like you've just farted or told them you're a leper. I'd really value help to bridge that gap so I can be cool too and keep up with the Moose herd! It may seem strange, but I've found contracting in London/UK over the past 13 years, that while OO coders clearly need know a whole lot of stuff that I don't, it normally the roles I find that need OO are in industries that pay much less than the Telecom & Banking roles I've done which have never asked for OO, so there's never been a business incentive for me to cross-train, but I would like to learn it some day! It would be great to have some kind of meaningful introduction to OO for procedural Perl programmers, how it's different and what its strengths and weaknesses are, and when I should and shouldn't be using it. I would hope this would give me a beach-head to start teaching myself via Google, because when you don't don't know the vocab or understand the way of thinking, you don't know how to phrase your searches properly, or don't even know what you should be searching for.
• modern perl idioms. refactoring perl.
• More best practices and techniques on how to become a better programmer would of been benefical. However I did enjoy the content!
• more core perl
• oops in perl starting
• Perl in DevOps Distributed "social network" stuff Web applications development
• Perl Sysadmin Tools
• XS

How do you rate the workshop?

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

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