PerlCon 2019 in Rīga

This year our Perl conference took place in Rīga under the new and improved name PerlCon. Improving names was generally a hot topic, I won't go into details here, but please do checkout the discussion and participate!

Andrew Shitov and Grigorii Filomafitskii did a great job organizing another wonderful Perl conference, for the second time in Rīga. As the venue was also a hotel (with a small spa (the water kind, not JavaScript..)), I was expecting a few attendees to show up in bathrobes during talks, but this did not happen...

Some notes and quotes I managed to remember

  • The Perl test suite runs more than 1.200.000 tests (SawyerX) - impressive.
  • Jonathan wants to get people to say: "I have to write prettier code because it's faster".
  • Curtis "repeat the question, moron!" Poe warns us to "Always be suspicious of people saying always" in his talk about Testing Lies.
  • IRC is like slack without gifs (Job in his ligtning talk).
  • curl wttr.in is a lot of fun, as are the other Console oriented sites run by Igor Chubin (some (ab)using braille console fonts to generate graphs).
  • A critique of CAPTCHAs can be very fun, featuring rubber chickens (a featherless biped) and AIs interpreting a painting of a certain nearly 2000 year old crucifixion as "a person posing for a picture".
  • José Joaquín Atria showed us various Perl game engines, sadly none of with are really suited to attract young game developers to use Perl.
  • "PostgreSQL is fast out of the box, Oracle is expensive out of the box" - Cutis "Ovid" Poe in his lightning-fast lightning talk about 500 TPS.
  • "If the only thing you have is a screwdriver, everything is screwed". (Jonathan in his Keynote on Perl 6 Concurrency)
  • With such a wonderful view from his office, it's no wonder Robert Acock is relaxed enough to work with Progressive Web Applications and even come up with a Perl module to help us generate the necessary JavaScript.
  • The gong traveled 276.587 km!

I missed quite a lot of talks, so I'm looking forward to the videos of all the talks. Currently there are "only" the live stream dumps available, but in the near future we'll get access to the distinct talks on youtube. Thanks a lot to the video team / Shadowcat Systems and all the people helping to record the videos!

Social

I had (as usual) a wonderful time chatting with old and new friends in the hallway track, during the coffee breaks and lunch, at the attendees dinner ("IT IS LOUD IN HERE.." - "WHAT???"), at the official and unofficial game night (The Great Dalmuti is still one of the best games for a crowd of casual (non)-gamers) and while walking through Rīga.

And I was quite impressed by the language skills of the 11 year old artist and soon-to-be Dalmuti grandmaster from Estonia, whose name I unfortunately could not remember and who did not sign his drawing of me..

My talks

I also did two lightning talks, one about my new tattoo, and the other about a rather old project (from 2008), Acme::ReturnValues and the accompanying website https://returnvalues.plix.at/

2020 and the future of PerlCon

As the YAPC::Europe Foundation is quite dead (at least in a practical way), there was nobody to choose the location of next years conference. Therefore this task was handed off to the attendees. They could decide between two proposals: Amsterdam and Cyprus. After two short presentations, everybody got a glass token to put into one of two plastic boxes - it was a very transparent election :-). This went surprisingly fast, and in the end Amsterdam won with a tight margin of 7 votes: Amsterdam 64 : 57 Cyprus. So we won't see attendees in bath trunks next year...

Please also check out the general PerlCon Wiki, where we try to amass all knowledge needed so we can continue to have great Perl conferences. If you want to participate and help, please join the Venue mailinglist!

Thanks

Thanks to the orgas, the speakers, the attendees, and of course the sponsors!

See you all again next year in Amsterdam!

Edits

  • Add source to postgres/oracle quote
  • Add source to irc/slack quote