brian_d_foy writes "For what it's worth, the 2006 OSCON Perl track schedule is available. I think the theme is "Time Travel" because I swear that looks a collection of talks from a conference that could have happened five years ago. :)"
a conference that could have happened five years ago
That makes me want to attend! : )
Hey, things were good five years ago--Perl's marketshare was huge because PHP was only starting to take off, spam was way less of a problem, and Pudge was still using Mac Classic
Seriously, I agree that OSCON doesn't have as strong a Perl track as YAPC. That has been the case since about the second or third YAPC. O'Reilly has always said that OSCON's the place to go when you deal with more than one open source technology: you'll find MySQL gurus, Linux gurus, web services gurus, Mozilla gurus, Javascript gurus, PostgreSQL gurus, Ruby gurus, and more at OSCON. You don't get that diversity at the deep-but-narrow conferences like YAPC, RubyCon, etc.
Different people come to OSCON for different reasons. Some people want the talks, some people want to pick the brains of the speakers, some people want to network with the other attendees. With over 1500 people there last year, there were a lot of opportunities to meet interesting people. The rooms were often packed, so many did go to the talks. It might bore Pudge and Brian, but a lot of people want to know what's new with Perl 6. If that's not you, that's okay. There might be other talks or other tracks that do interest you, or the networking might be more appealing.
I hope you won't be put off the conference by the comment from Brian. Please do check out the list of Perl talks and the other tracks, and do talk to other people who've been before. I'm always happy to hear comments and criticisms of the conference, and I do what I can to make it fun and valuable. Always feel free to drop me a line at gnat AT oreilly.com if you have any questions or comments.
--Nat
Re:Five Years Ago
Alias on 2006-04-15T16:50:34
I was also a bit dissapointed at the Perl track, but thanks for posting the combined list of talks.
Looking at that merged list, it looks like some of the more interesting Perl talks have been catagorised into other areas. Ingy's talk in Emerging, Theory's in Database, and so on.
So it's more like 15 perl talks, and I think my original comments (elsewhere) weren't entirely fair.
But then I can't come to both cons this year (too big a gap between them to be away from the office) and I did yours last year, so this year YAPC gets a turn:)
But next year, who knows. Here's hoping I can do both.
I too was sort of disappointed when I saw the listed talks. Not so much with their quality, but with their quantity. There are a half dozen of the standard time-tested talks and only another half dozen newer and more exciting things. I fear that with a lineup like that, the only "Perl gurus" in attendance might be the 10 or so paid speakers.
Personally I do think chromatic's talk looks pretty cool. Most of the rest of them are either not in my sphere of interest (I don't do web stuff anymore) or things I've seen before. So it will be hard to make the case to myself to attend.
In the past, TPC has seemed like "where it's happening" for the Perl conference world, but now it seems like they're purposefully ceding that ground to YAPC or something. If that's what it takes to sell tickets I guess that's fine, but it seems like a short-sighted strategy.
I do like the mixing of worlds that OSCON has offered when I've attended in the past. I hope it can continue to offer enough excitement for the advanced crowd so they keep attending and keep mixing with each other. I don't think there's any other venue offering that right now.
-Ken
Re:Talk selection
gnat on 2006-04-18T01:55:14
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Ken. What do you do these days?
--Nat
Re:Talk selection
kwilliams on 2006-04-18T12:52:42
Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, mostly. It's not a bad life. =) I'm also doing my share of guerilla Perl advocacy in our huge company, sometimes just by putting nice perl interfaces on C or Java libraries. A couple of them have made their way to CPAN in the Algorithm:: and Lingua:: namespaces.
-Ken
