Things I learned at YAPC::Europe 2014 in Sofia

Wow, I'm already back in Vienna for 4 days, but work, the yearly Vienna.pm Barbecue and family kept me from finishing this blog post. Until now!

YAPC::Europe 2014 in Sofia was (again) a wonderful experience. I did two talks (Code I'm proud of, OX & AngularJS) and choreographed a lightning talk: "The OAuth Dance" (video is now online!), thanks a lot to the dancers: Grrr, John, Maroš & Tux

Image by Marian, but I'm really looking forward to the video. The Dance was fun, but I'ma afraid it did not help a lot to make OAuth2 any clearer :-)

Things I learned at YAPC::Europe 2014 in Sofia, in no particular order:

  • Scheduling of talks can be outsourced, or as osfameron put it in the #yapceu topic: WE ARE IN YOUR CLOUDS, ORGANIZING YOUR YAPCS
  • Shim: otherwise known as a hack, kludge etc - or, in a proposal, a bridge (osfameron) (video)
  • Being forced to use HDMI instead of VGA to connect to a projector (so we get better resolution in the live stream / videos) remindes me of the good, old days when you had to recompile your kernel to get the stupid slides up. But we now have videos!!
  • If you tell xrandr to turn off your lcd display instead of the projector (resulting in a blank screen), typing 'xrandr --auto' helps (at least if you have a terminal in focus) (nine)
  • The Astrophysics Source Code Library is something like Matt's Script Archive for physicists (StrayTaoist) (video)
  • It's better to say "I'm hiring" that request volunteers for an unspecified lighting talk (sawyer_x)
  • Don't go near the Russian table during the attendees dinner unless you want to drink way to much Raki
  • Perl Conference T-Shirts should have "Perl" written on them. Nobody outside the echo-chamber (or was it the anechoic chamber?) knows what a "YAPC" is, thus the potential marketing oppertunity is lost (bulk88)
  • In Sofia, You can get a basket of figs (~10 pieces) for 1 Lev
  • Donald Duck's height is 60.96 cm (osfameron)
  • I like most of 12factor.net, but don't agree with everything
  • Getting a bunch of people to agree on how to hack on ACT is even harder than getting 20+ people to decide on a place for dinner
  • "aaahs per minute" is the official success metric of catpic websites (Su-Shee) (video)
  • We're not the only ones using OX
  • There is more than one way to do "Hello World" in Perl 6, and nine's version is very impressing
  • http://matrix.org/ could be interesting
  • as could be Hijk, as seen here
  • Perl 6 has asynchronos data structures (Promises, Supplies)
  • When jnthn talks about something he did "when he was 10 years stupider", it was probably two years ago
  • Liz and Wendy are very good at organising & hosting last-minute hackathons

I assume I learned more, but already forgot it, so I have even more to learn at next year's YAPC::Europe in Granada!

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