Yesterday evening I was so happy to return home from Italy. No, Italy is great, my fear was my palm tree I bought last month which was standing at the door of my house without water. I am so happy to say it survived well.
The weather in Italy was amazing ââ¬â nothing to do with neither Amsterdam with its moderate climate nor Moscow's fires and smog my friends suffer from.
Although Italians may be very unpleasant when they do have their critical days having to serve foreigners in bars, the general impression is definitely positive. And I was happy as a child when (yeah, after some drinks) was able to use my Italian (which is obviously much much better than my Dutch or Latvian :-) for short communications asking for directions or at cafes/airport/taxi/hotel. Really, I did not expect it from myself as I have only passed basic Italian course living in Moscow more than a half year ago, and had no experience after that.
OK, being a crazy one (in a terminology of Cog), conferences for me is not only talks or travel fun, but also a keep-my-eye-on behaviour how all is going on from the point of view of the organizers.
Have to say that the conference was organized pretty well. There were a couple of things I'd like to improve, but that was not too important for the conference itself as well for most of the attendees.
First, there were no printed schedule in the morning of the first day. Even if everyone seems to bring their laptop, online schedule is not the one I prefer personally. Like with books, paper is preferable for human.
The second thing was lack of information of what and where goes on beyond the conference. Namely, I missed Night Pisa tour, and lots of us had difficulties with figuring out where the post-conference meeting takes place (and later, finding the way to it). Not to say that the bar selected for that was awful even if the personnel spoke English (I'd prefer much more entertaining Italian speaker than the one speaking English and hating foreigners).
As for talks, I can't say I fully enjoyed the programme, as being a person driven by ideas I can't attend talks with lots of Moose/Catalyst/internals/DB boring stuff :-) Opposite, every Perl 6 talk I attended was amazing (although I missed two and a half of them due to some collisions in my personal schedule). Hope one day to see talk recordings online (and would like to update yapc.tv as well). My personal grand prix goes to the talk on NQP by Patrick. It was a good introduction into a sublanguage I never considered worth to explore.
And I'like to say that I am looking forward to Perl 6 hackathon we would like to organize in Moscow on the day before YAPC::Russia, namely on 13th of May 2011. I'll find the venue for that.
And not to forget, we won the contest and (ha-ha, have to) are hosting the next YAPC::Europe in Riga, 15-17 August of 2011.
Cheers.
