Things I learned at YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev

I'm now sitting at the airport waiting for boarding after an excellent YAPC::Europe 2013. The perfect opportunity to convert my random notes into a proper blog post.

I did two talks: ZeroMQ & Perl and Bread::Board by example.

I also added a new feature to ACT. We now have a slides page which lists all URLs of slides in one convenient page, see here. The code is far from perfect, but Maddingue still merged & deployed it during the conference (thanks!).

The game of this YAPC was The Great Dalmuti. rGeoffrey brought an English version and I had a German one. It's a real simple & fun game, especially if you get a group of six to eight people.

Things I learned at YAPC::Europe 2013 in Kiev, in no particular order:

  • The new WLAN-Spots at VIE are well-designed and quite usable.
  • Even though the (old) buildings look a lot like those in Vienna, Kiev looks (or feels?) more like Berlin because it has very wide roads, wide sidewalks and lots of trees. It also pays off to enter the courtyards. Some of them are very beautiful semiprivate parks, some offer amazing views off hacked together balconies...
  • In Kiev, ice cream is sold by the gram.
  • At least on Sunday, there are very few cars in Kiev. Those that do drive around seem very loud (because of the cobblestones), very expensive and very deadly (they go rather fast).
  • If there is a YAPC happening, you're bound to meet some fellow hackers at strange places in the city.
  • ... is Perl6's concept of afterlife. ➢➢
  • Even though Lightning Talks where first introduced at a Python event, they did not work for them because the needed so much significant pauses. ➢➢
  • Redis seems very interesting. But it has even more ridiculous function names than PHP. Exhibit A: BRPOPLPUSH. ➢➢
  • Do as your sysadmin tells you or she will forward you her midnight SMS alerts.
  • "May your network connection be fast and stable" should be the official YAPC greeting.
  • Vroom can seriously sabotage your talk (luckily I only experienced this as an attendee and nperez handled the failures well.) ➢➢
  • The Rakudo-team is hiring :-)
  • People really liked my Bicycle.pm T-Shirt. You can now get the designs here.
  • "Have you ever evaled random data from the Internet" - "Yes, it's called CPAN"
  • Organize a local Perl workshop and "DarkPAN will arise". If you want to organize a YAPC or a Workshop, please read Barbie's Perl-Jam) ➢➢
  • It is not allowed to play any card games (not even The Great Dalmuti) in the Hotel Lobby (or other bars).
  • Ligretto isn't the most communicative game out there, but very funny. And stressy!
  • Hieroglyphs are 6000 year old golf. ➢➢
  • Booking.com still doesn't like ZeroMQ for semi-valid reasons. But they are also using a two year old release (2.*), and a lot of their issues might have been solved in 3.2. So I'm still going to continue to ignore Steffens and nperez advice to ditch ZeroMQ. ➢➢
  • But this tweet from nperez is still fun and true: ZeroMQ is a horribly leaky abstraction with propaganda as documentation
  • A river cruise is a fantastic way to organize the social event. It was really nice.
  • Even though we know a lot about parallelism, forking, etc, we still totally suck at forming efficient real life queues.
  • Anti cyclic behavior helps getting a proper lunch by avoiding said queues (for the price of missing the last 5 minutes of a talk).
  • The first telecommunication technology (in the Victorian area) wasn't the telegraph but railways. ➢➢
  • When storing a past event, always convert it into UTC and store it that way (I knew that). But when storing a future event (esp. if it's more than a year in the future), store it in the local timezone and only convert to UTC on the given day. This way you can properly handle the changes to time zones and/or daylight savings that might happen in the meantime. ➢➢
  • AnyEvent CondVars have two methods begin and end which can use instead of send to better handle nested setting of condvars. ➢➢
  • Managers love bling, unless the want a rowboat and get a cruise ship. ➢➢
  • "The leather guy" seems to be the Slovenian word for graphic designer. ➢➢
  • This years Austrian Perl Workshop will very likely take place on the first weekend in November in Salzburg. Thanks Denis!
  • There is a very nice vinyl shop in Kiev called Diskultura. I spend nearly two hours there browsing through their selection and talking with the guy working there about weird Austrian and Ukrainian music.
  • At YAPC::Europe you are constantly surrounded by people more intelligent and/or more crazy than you. Which is my main reason for attending :-)

CPAN Modules and other code I should check out:

Funny quotes I read on IRC

  • Nicholas likes it that the joke meme is "We're hiring"
  • <Maddingue> yesterday night, the wifi in my hotel was so flaky I couldn't even complain about it on twitter
  • <domm_kiev> YAPC = massiv multiplayer sleep deprivation experiment
  • <rGeoffreeey> YAPC is a game convention where Perl can break out
  • <perigrin> YAPC is a drinking contest where the Fluxx players have discussions about programming.

Thanks, thanks thanks to the organizers, sponsors, speakers & attendees!

Let's all meet again next year in Sofia!