This is one of those journal entries, which should have been published a long time ago. Well the day after the last day of YAPC::Europe 2008 it should have been published, but the last day took a turn for the worse, which made me hesitate writing anything about the YAPC and the YAPC::Europe 2008 in particular until I had time to find out what to write.
I have been thinking this journal entry over and over again and I finally decided to sit down and just get it out of my system, the writing process would probably be good for me and for structuring my thoughts.
Day 3 went okay, I for one started feeling weary from the many days of conference. My dreams had begun to be extremely vivid, not your usual YAPC organizer nightmares, but just colorful crazy dreams, I expect to be a product to the exposure of so many people and inputs over such short time span. Anyway sleep was not sufficient and the organizing work is draining.
My wife call just after lunch, that they had called from the nursery that our youngest kid had a fever. We agreed she should pick him up, but I should come home as early as possible. I talked to tagg one of the other organizers and we agreed that I would leave in the afternoon, when things were slowing down.
The rest of the day went with practical duties and talking to attendees and speakers.
When I got home and the kids were activated and things was running smoothly I logged on to IRC so hear how things where going at the conference. The auction was still on and it just kept going... I was more focused on my fellow organizers being in charge of the clean up, so I phoned tagg and defekt and I was informed that it looked okay, there had cleaned up in the unused rooms and things did not look as if I was needed they were enough hands to close the venue down as soon as things died out.
The following days I was intensely scanning my RSS feeds for anything on YAPC::Europe, I skipped attending brian d foy's tutorial for which I was signed up, Sylvester was still having a fever and I was pretty tired too. I found this blog entry at first I thought, "What the guy never attended a YAPC before?", but it still bothered me, I heard that the auction had taken way too long and now this so I read some more blogs and talked to a few people attempting to get a picture of what had happened at the auction.
Attending Josh McAdams' 'Test Driven Development' tutorial I talked to some of the conference attendees and I got to see some pictures of the incident. A thread on Act users was also discussing the problem with the auction.
I have attended several YAPCs and I am of that opinion that the problems with auction has just been growing over the years. I am just incredibly saddened that it peaked at my YAPC. I will come back to the difficulties of being an YAPC organizer in a later journal entry.
I hope the 2008 auction does not scare people away from attending future YAPCs. It seems the Perl community itself is addressing the problems and nobody blames the organizers, as written earlier I will get back to this in a later journal entry.
I finally got to put face on some people from the Perl community I have not met before. There were also people attending whom I would have loved to talk to, but never got the time.
I also got to meet a lot of old friends and there where friend not attending that I hope I will see next year or perhaps at some other Perl community event, a lot of these seem to be popping up all over the landscape.
In general I had a marvelous conference, we made a lot of mistakes and there were many things we could/should have done differently or at least done and I have a large responsibility in this.
I personally enjoyed the conference in the extent possible (practically not seeing any talks) and it seemed like most people had a good time. I attempted to talk to as many people I could using people I already know as hooks in the crowd.
