I went to my 3rd Italian Perl Workshop,
last week. It seems to have been the most successful Italian conference to
date, and it certainly succeeded at being both a national workshop and an
international event. It hadn’t occurred to me before that these are actually
two orthogonal aims.
An international event
The organizers managed to pull out all the stops with sponsorship. There’s
always various random swag, books for the auction, cheap/free use of rooms from
the University. And in recent years, the conference has had just enough money
to be completely free of charge, even with its (excellent) coffee and biscuit
break. But this year, the
“platinum”, “gold” and “silver” sponsors contributed enough money to pay
travel and accomodation for speakers of international calibre:
- Tim Bunce
- Rafaël Garcia-Suarez
- Marcus Ramberg
- Matt Trout
Other international attendees included Michel “XML::Twig” Rodriguez (though he
lives in nearby Lucca and spoke in Italian); Bruno (a Pole who lives in
Spain… or Amsterdam or something… I’m confused, especially as to why he
attended the Pisa workshop :-); a bevy of Norwegians from Opera’s HR
team; and another Norwegian expat who was completely unrelated; an Indian
postgrad studentessa; and me, I guess.
Hmmm, 4 Norwegians, 3 Brits, 2 French. I wouldn’t have expected quite that
many Norwegians, largely because I’d never have thought that Opera, based in
Oslo, would have been recruiting at a workshop in Italy. But it’s on their
“world tour” as several of the core Perl team for their social network are
Italian. And they really capitalised on the opportunity, sending 3 perlisti
and 2 HR, all of whom were very visible throughout, sponsored a competition
for a Wii, and hired an interview room for recruiting sessions during the
workshop. I’ll be really interested to see how successful they, and the
other recruiting companies (Wind, Dada, A-Tono) have been. It’s very positive
that Italian companies using Perl are getting involved like this.
Oh, the talks! Matt spoke about Devel::Declare, which rocks. I finally
got to see Tim Bunce’s Perl Myths talk in the flesh, and also his demo of
Devel::NYTProf which is so beautiful it makes me want to cry. Marcus
introduced Catalyst, and I missed the others, for various reasons.
A national event
There’s a danger that the focus on the exotic allure of geeks arriving by
luxurious Ryanair jet could distract from the fact that this is also the event
for Italian programmers. Having two tracks, and a general policy of not
scheduling 2 “guests” against each other worked very well here.
The first day’s Italian talks concentrated on beginner and intermediate
topics, including dakkar’s tutorial and regex theory, and Flavio Poletti on
writing IRC bots, though there was some crossover, as rgs also presented on
coding style in English. The perl.it guys are really keen on appealing to new
programmers, which is fantastic. (There was a little gnashing of teeth about
how the recent Pycon in Italy had even more attendees despite being a younger
conference.)
Not that it was all for beginners: emi spoke about Linux wifi captive
portal setup; emazep showed a fantastic UI for constructing complex DB queries,
running on Catalyst with jQuery; grubert presented a news portal prototyped in
2 months with the awesome power of CPAN; [LucaS] finally presented his
workgroup software IGSuite, yay! Cosimo spoke about scaling and the Dogpile
Effect at Opera. Sadly I missed the “GUI track” completely with Mattia Barbon,
the author of WxPerl, and nids talking about Perl/TK. And finally I had to
give an emergency talk myself to fill in a gap (went OK, trailed off towards
the end).
More info
IPW2008
slides
and
photos
are already being posted, and larsen is collating blog posts to link to from
the main perl.it page.