Two weeks ago I attended YAPC::Europe 2009 in Lisbon, Portgual. This wasn't the first YAPC in Portugal - in 2005 we went to Braga, a university town inland and it was a very well organised conference. It's no surprise the YAPC in Lisbon was also amazingly well organised, as it was the same organisers - José Castro (cog), Alberto Simões (ambs) and Magda Joana Silva. Thank you so much José, Alberto, Magda and all the others involved - it was amazing.
The theme of the conference was "Corporate Perl" and this made a useful track in the vast schedule. It's amazing all the places Perl is used. Every talk I attended was great - the speakers knew their material and explained their content well. Some of the presentations are already online, see "Talk" in the schedule.
I liked the venue, three metro stops away from our hotel (also very walkable). The main room was huge and the three other tracks were just nearby, leaving a large space behind these for socialising with the just-over 300 attendees (and easy access to the sun). This was also where the terribly-important refreshments were, including oh-so-tasty pastéis de Nata.
The attendees' dinner was great. It was in a huge churrascaria (meat on swords!) by the river. It was also a good location for the Quizz Show, with 16 two-person teams fighting to be the geekiest. This was quite hard, as the questions varied from Portuguese history, Star Trek, Buffy and Perl internals ("How many levels of precedence does Perl 5.10.0 have?") to Unix history.
Community was very important at the conference - there are lots of seperate groups of Perl people clustered around the core, Perl modules, Perl projects or even cities and conferences are where you can mix, meet people in real life and start making crazy plans for the future. There are so many exciting things going on in Perl and I'm really looking forward to YAPC::Europe in Pisa in 2010!
