Things I learned at YAPC::Europe 2012

I'm currently sitting in a train back to Vienna (via Salzburg), having spend the last three days in Frankfurt at YAPC::Europe 2012. The seats in the train are only moderately more comfortable than the bike seat I set on while cycling to Frankfurt with Maros.

The conference was again wonderful, interesting & fun. The main annoyance was the HOT weather, but I'm afraid I cannot blame Frankfurt.pm for this. I did one talk, Logging Hell, and a rather bad lightning talk, introducing Bicycle.pm (Maros and me planned on during the talk together, but the he got ill, and I got notified at the start of the lighting talk session that we (or rather I) can do the talk). Anyways:

Things I learned at YAPC::Europe 2012 in Frankfurt, in no particular order:

  • Do not use unstable beta drivers for your nvidia card if you're giving a presentation. (Even if you need those drivers for suspend/resume to work)
  • Holding a clicker in one hand and a mic in the other leaves no hand to take a sip of water during your talk. Putting down the mic and taking a sip is still a better idea then talking 40 minutes straight on.
  • Apfelwein is delicious
  • Having your own bike at the conference is very comfortable (for quick trips to the market to fetch watermelons, to grab some proper food, to be independent from public transport, ...)
  • Log Everything, Monitor Everything
  • irl:// is a very nice protocol! Use it!
  • There are more ways to roll a cigarette than I've known of (and they tend to involve a lot of origami-like folding and handling of Wuzzelpapier (aka cigarette paper))
  • A lot of people wear finger-socks inside their finger-shoes
  • Air-condition can be a good thing
  • We now have names for common Moose Role Usage Patterns (I've been using this patterns for years, let's see if the names stick...)
  • Frankfurt isn't the most exciting city on this planet
  • Showering twice a day may still not be enough
  • There are more and more sponsors who love Perl as much as the community does
  • One benefit of sending alerts via email when you log an error message is that you might already have fixed the bug before your co-worker arrives at your desk to complain about the error she just got.
  • App::TimeTracker has more users than I thought
  • If we ever start to localize HTTP itself, in de_DE, POST should be translated to PFOSTEN
  • Even though we all know about parallelization, we still do not fork more processes when queuing for food
  • /me wants p5-mop
  • Richard Foley published a book on World Naked Bike Rides
  • -Ouseful
  • Write more apps (as demanded by Maros & Matt)
  • BooK can speak in TLDs

A lot of thanks to the organizers, speakers, sponsors & attendees, who all together made this wonderful conference happen!

I'm already looking forward to next year's YAPC::Europe in Kiev!