YAPC::Europe 2014 - 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
74Responded
99No Response
173Total
42Response Percentage

Age Band:

Age Band: pie chart

CountDescription
0under 20
1520 - 29
3330 - 39
2140 - 49
550 - 59
060 and over

Gender:

Although this question is optional, with your help we would like to monitor changes in attendance over time.

Gender: pie chart

CountDescription
69Male
4Female
1It's Complicated

Job Type:

Job Type: pie chart

CountDescription
5CEO/Company Director/Senior Manager
0Non-Technical Manager
4Technical Manager
7Technical Architect/Analyst
44Developer
4Engineer
3SysAdmin
1Student
1Lecturer/Teacher/Trainer
0Human Resources
0Researcher
1Unemployed
4Other

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:

  • Engineer
  • internal communications, information (incl.security) and personnel development dept + deputy of senior architect
  • Principal Technology Consultant
  • Recruitment
  • Selfemployeed

Industry:

Industry: pie chart

CountDescription
2Automotive
2Education
1Engineering
8Finance
3Government
14IT Services
25Internet/Web
0Legal
1Logistics
1Media/Entertainment
1Medical/Healthcare
1Property
1Research
3Retail
3Telecommunications
2Travel
0Unemployed
6Other

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:

  • Fraud detection
  • IT
  • mobile app analytics
  • Recruitment
  • security
  • what's an industry sector?

Region:

Region: pie chart

CountDescription
4Bulgaria
12UK / Ireland
37Western Europa
13Eastern Europa
2Southern Europa
6United States / Canada
0Asia / 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
3Beginner
24Intermediate
47Advanced

How long have you been programming in Perl?

CountDescription
1less than a year
71-2 years
83-5 years
135-10 years
45more than 10 years

How many previous YAPCs have you attended?

CountDescription
18This was my first YAPC
Attended YAPCs123456789101112131416total
YAPC::Europe138666412211-32-254
YAPC::NA523---1-------141
YAPC::Russia1-21-----------11

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

CountDescription
14Never attended one
Attended Workshops1234567891011121314total
Austrian Perl Workshop131--111------31
Belgian Perl Workshop1---2---------11
French Perl Workshop2121----1-----23
German Perl Workshop721-1--2-2-1-183
Italian Perl Workshop111--1--------12
London Perl Workshop42623--11-----66
Netherlands Perl Workshop52-11------2--42
Nordic Perl Workshop412-----1-----21
Ukrainian Perl Workshop1-------------1
any American Perl Workshops32------1-----16
any Russian Perl Workshops2--1----------6
Other Perl Workshops7511----------24

Do you plan to attend a future YAPC/Workshop?

CountDescription
65Yes
6Maybe
1Don'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 am very, very likely to attend another YAPC, the one reason I could think of why I would not is that I had a hard time feeling relaxed outside of the talks. But that is more of a personal problem.
  • The program is probably too accurate on Perl mechanics for me. I may return in a few years, to keep in touch with the latest developments
  • Traveling expenses and/or distance

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

CountDescription
55Yes
17No

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

CountDescription
6Yes
5Maybe
0Don't Know
13No

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

CountDescription
45I'm a CPAN Author
4I'm a CPAN Tester
26I'm a Perl event organiser (e.g. YAPC, Perl Workshop, QA Hackathon, local technical meetings, etc.)
4I'm a board or committee member of a recognised Perl body (e.g. TPF, EPO, YEF, JPF, etc.)
14I'm a Perl project developer (e.g. Rakudo, Catalyst, Dancer, Padre, etc.)
18I have a technical blog (e.g. on blogs.perl.org or a personal blog)
15I use or contribute to PerlMonks or other Perl related forums
42I use IRC (e.g. #perl, #yapc, #london.pm, etc.)
13I contribute to Perl mailing lists (e.g. P5P, Perl QA, etc)
8other ...

If 'Other' please enter your area of contribution

  • bug reports
  • I am attempting to start Weather.pm
  • Only Jarkko has more core commits than me :-)
  • Perl Toolchain Gang
  • Regular speaker at Perl events
  • StackOverflow
  • write articles about Perl
  • writing articles as a technical journalist

YAPC::Europe 2014

Regarding YAPC::Europe 2014 in Sofia specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

CountDescription
40I'm now a regular YAPC::Europe attendee
8After YAPC::Europe 2014 in Kiev
1After reading a YAPC::Europe blog post
4I was nominated to attend by manager/colleague
5I was recommended to attend by friend/colleague
2After reading the Perl Weekly
2After seeing a link or advert on a Perl specific website
0After seeing a link or advert on a non-Perl website
0After seeing a link on Twitter, Facebook or other social media website.
0After reading an email sent to a mailing list I was in
0After seeing other promotions online/in the press
10other ...

If 'Other', what else helped you decide?

  • After approval of the Grant Proposal of ACT Voyager
  • After hearing from Marian Marinov while studying in Telerik Academy
  • After the Czech Perl workshop
  • interested in Perl people from Europe
  • location, slavic language
  • meetup/booking
  • seeing irc users going to attend
  • Sponsor
  • talk accepted and company confirmed funding
  • the buddies forced me ;)

Were you a speaker?

CountDescription
23No
18No, but I have spoken before at similar conferences
21Yes, and I have spoken before at similar conferences
10Yes, 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
34Yes
6No

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

CountDescription
36Yes
2No
11Ask me later

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

CountDescription
34Yes
23No

If 'Yes', which speakers?

CountDescription
17Larry Wall
10Damian Conway
3Ricardo Signes & Tim Bunce
2Patrick Michaud, Mark Jason Dominus & brian d foy
1Tatsuhiko Miyagawa, Gerda Shank, Paul Fenwick, Charles Stross, Leo Lapworth, Sebastian Riedel, Steffen Ullrich, Rene becker, Aaron Crane, Adam Kennedy, smylers, Audrey Tang, Tobias 'FROGGS' Leich, Arthur Axel "fREW" Schmidt, David Golden, Tomas Doran, Dave Cross, Simon Peyton Jones, Moriz Lens, Stevan Little, Jesse Vincent & John Napiorkowski

Additional comments:

  • perl core team, perl future visioners, incl, Larry ;-)
  • Quite a few London lot were missing
  • Regretted Larry's absence; still haven't managed to see Conway or Dominus in person.
  • Simon Peyton Jones (he doesn't do any Perl, but he's so pleasant to listen to)
  • There are many more interesting speakers in our community. But them not being present brought more attention to new speakers: that's a good thing!
  • Would have been nice to actually see Larry. Hope he gets well soon.

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

CountDescription
0More beginner level talks
10More intermediate level talks
22More advanced level talks
30It's about right
8No preference

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

  • (big) data, UI/usability, high end networking, automation/devops, visualization, functional programming, evented/async
  • * More talks on the Perl internals in a non-threatening, engaging manner * More talks on hacking scientific data * More talks on hacking hardware
  • any non-perl related talks, also I would love to see some hard core kernel hacking, embedding the interpreter, XS magic
  • applications written in Perl mentioning the used CPAN modules
  • async stuff, distributed stuff,
  • Bioinformatics
  • Fewer talks about things that happened to be done in Perl (and with very little Perl or programming content), and more talks about Perl programming and programming / software dev in general.
  • GUI, handling abstraction
  • How to use Perl with other languages/frameworks
  • I think a tutorial track would be good, especially for much-raved about tech like DBIC, Moose, various web frameworks
  • Large scale perl systems, managing legacy perl
  • Links from perl modules to Linux packages. Generally speaking: how to spread perl modules and / or applications to a wider audience though Linux distributions.
  • Management related topics.
  • Math
  • more security and network related talks
  • More talks about general principles and concepts rather than specific implementations/modules
  • More war stories ("this is what we did. this is what worked. this is what went wrong. this is what we learned")
  • p5p introduction (who is there, how to get involved)
  • Perl 5 compiler guts, especially embedding Perl 5
  • Perl 6
  • perl IDE parallelism perl & patterns
  • Perl internals, XS
  • Perl6, telecommunication and automatization
  • Practical perl6 projects
  • Success stories from companies other than in ISP/web hosting space. GoodData, for example :-)
  • Success stories, "war" stories (showing actual solutions to real problems people and companies face)
  • testing, system administration, automation
  • We should try to implement a proper beginner track again. Pass the slides on from conference to conference provide a farm system to develop the next generation of speakers.
  • Web site scaling; distributed job queues; continuous delivery; more Plack, PSGI, and web framework talks; community, especially NA+EU+JP collaboration; more on testing code; more on awesome Perl features and projects.
  • XS, project management, cat herding/social management

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 12 28 17 6 -
Website 12 33 19 6 -
Registration process 37 25 7 - -
Directions/Maps 26 27 12 2 -
Content of the talks 26 38 6 - -
Schedule efficiency 34 24 11 - -
BOFs 12 7 5 2 -
Social events 40 22 3 1 -
Parking 5 2 1 - -
Facilities 30 30 4 2 -
Food service 8 43 17 3 -
Accommodation 32 28 3 - -
Staff 58 12 - - -
Overall experience 44 24 2 - -
Value for price 47 22 1 - -

Key:

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

Conference Attendance

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
3€ 100
3€ 150
6€ 200
1€ 200+
4€ 250
4€ 300
1€ 400
8€ 500
1€ 600
1€ 700
4€ 1000

Standard Rate:

CountFee
1€ 50
2€ 70
1€ 75
1€ 80
1€ 80-100
1€ 99
27€ 100
1€ 110
1€ 125
3€ 150
4€ 200
1€ 250

Concession Rate:

CountFee
1€ 10
3€ 20
4€ 30
1€ 35
2€ 40
15€ 50
1€ 50-100
1€ 60
1€ 70
2€ 75
1€ 100

Would you pay more for a YAPC if we could exclude sponsorship advertising?

CountDescription
14Yes
45No

If so, how much?

CountFee
1€ 30
2€ 50
1€ 90
2€ 100
2€ 150
1€ 175
1€ 400
1€ 1000

How did you pay for the conference fee?

CountDescription
19N/A - I was a speaker
2N/A - I was a sponsor
28My company paid
17I paid out of my own pocket
0I wasn't able to attend

If your employer didn't send you, did they give you time off to attend?

CountDescription
24Yes
11No

Does distance prevent you from being able to attend some YAPCs?

CountDescription
31Yes
33No