2003 Perl Conferences

May 6, 2003 by Simon Cozens

The season of Perl conferences is almost upon us! In fact, the first of the YAPCs for this year is in less than a week. So I thought this would be a good time to give a tour of the various conferences and see what’s going on at each.

YAPC::Israel

The first of the conferences, starting on Sunday, May 11, is YAPC::Israel. If you were planning to attend this, then please note that that’s one day earlier than originally announced. It’ll be at Haifa University, at the Caesarea Rothschild Institute.

What’s going on? Well, there’ll be a variety of presentations in Hebrew and in English: Reuven Lerner will be teaching the five things every Perl programmer should know; Yevgeny Menaker, author of “Programming Perl in the .NET Environment,” will be talking about .NET; and there’s a strong X Windows theme to the conference, with a Tk tutorial from Ido Trivizki, Ran Eliam presenting a new UI toolkit, and Mikhael Goikhman talking about X11 window managers and Perl.

The usual collection of lightning talks will take place, and special guest Mark-Jason Dominus will be presenting a set of lightning talks all by himself. Mark is also keynoting with a retrospective of the Quiz Of The Week. After the conference, Mark will be giving three one-day training courses. (Not included in the conference.)

All this and more for 150 Shekels. Can’t be bad.

YAPC::Canada

Hot on the heels of the Israel conference will be the Canadian YAPC, on May 15-16. This will be 85 Canadian Dollars and includes dinner, a barbeque and CD-ROM proceedings.

YAPC::Canada will be keynoted by Dick Hardt of ActiveState - Dick will be talking about the history of Perl on Windows.

There’ll be both free and professional tutorials at this YAPC, with Peter Scott giving tuition on object-oriented Perl. The two free tutorials are Mick Villeneuve’s “Yet Another Perl Tutorial” for first-time Perl programmers, and Steve Jenkins’ “Introduction to Regular Expressions.”

The presentations will be divided into a beginner and an advanced stream; highlights include talks on the Perl debugger, Class::DBI, event loops, extreme testing, and Perl date and time handling.

Perl Whirl

In June, some of us lucky individuals will be talking about Perl on a ship in the waters around Hawaii for the 2003 Perl Whirl. There’ll be a strong Perl 6 theme, with four half-day courses on Perl 6. Randal Schwartz will be presenting his packages, objects, references and modules tutorial to complement the new sequel to Learning Perl. MJD will be there, too, giving his famous Red Flags tutorial, and a half-day tutorial on iterators and generators.

There’ll be other talks, of course, although the program isn’t yet finalized. I shall attend, talking about how you can use Perl 6 right now - in a manner of speaking. … And, of course, there’ll be Hawaii, the Wizards’ Cocktail Party, and much more.

YAPC::NA

In mid-June comes the main Yet Another Perl Conference. This year, it’s at Boca Raton, Fla., from June 16-18. The cost is $85.

Tutorials include Damian Conway’s “Everyday Perl” and Tim Maher’s “Minimal Perl,” Randal’s PROM tutorial again, and Abigail’s half-day regex tutorial. Larry and Damian will present a two-hour slot on Perl 6 on the final day.

Other short talks that caught my eye were Helen Cook talking about video manipulation; Schuyler Erle on geocaching; and two talks from Piers Cawley, on refactoring and the Pixie object persistence framework.

OSCon/TPC 7

And then in July, where we have the main event, The Perl Conference, on the theme of “Embracing and Extending Proprietary Software.”

Again, Perl 6 will figure extensively, with talks from Damian on “What’s New in Perl 6,” the new Perl6::Rules module, Dan Sugalski and Leon Brocard on Parrot, and Allison Randal explaining the Perl 6 design philosophy.

For those of us still using Perl 5, I would recommend Ask Bjoern Hansen and Robert Spier’s explanation of the perl.org single-signon process, Andy Wardley talking about what’s new in Template Toolkit 3, and the unmissable random talk by MJD.

Of course, there’s more than just Perl things going on at OSCon - you can drop into sessions on Apache, MySQL and PostGreSQL, Python and Ruby, the XML track and the eclectic “Emerging Topics” track. There’s also be keynotes from Weta Digital on animating the “Lord of the Rings” movies, Mitch Kapor on his open-source desktop applications project, and George Dyson on “Von Neumann’s Universe.”

It’s all happening at the Portland Mariott, from July 7-11. Make sure you’re there.

YAPC::Europe

Less than two weeks after TPC comes the final event of the conference season, the European YAPC, at the CNAM Conservatoire in Paris.

Details of speakers are not yet confirmed, but we know it’ll be July 23-25, and it’ll be vast quantities of fun.

And finally …

In case you’re overwhelmed by the amount of conferences on this year, I maintain an at-a-glance calendar at iCal Exchange; if you’re a user of Apple’s iCal, you can subscribe to the Perl Conferences calendar at http://web.archive.org/web/20040121183005/http://www.icalx.com:80/public/PerlConf/Perl32Conferences.ics

I hope to see you at one or more of the above!