As one of the planners of the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop http://pghpw.org> I would be very interested to hear what people would like to see at the Workshop.
So I ask:
What would you like to see at a YAPC or Workshop?
I'd like for the workshops to have more than just talks. For example: have hands-on bring-your-own-laptop tutorial sessions that might last three or four hours. It would be a little tricky, because each person would have to download new modules or projects, but it could be done... I think
There seems to be some value in having workshop attendees leave the workshop with a system that actually can do what they just saw at the workshop. I guess I see the expected content of conferences, workshops and hackathons to be:
A few hours spent getting a Catalyst or Jifty app up and running with the help of a project contributor could be very valuable. Even mucking through something like an ORM system or XML parser with the help of someone knowledgeable would be well worth attending a workshop.
As I understand it, the theme of this year's PPW is things to provoke thought and new ideas in the Perl world. As such, I'd like to see some Moose workshops since it was under-represented at this year's YAPC. Moose and autobox definitely define a new way to write Perl code that looks quite promising.
Another not really new but under-examined area that I have an interest in, mainly due to my $job, is embedded database technology. Such as SQLite, BerkeleyDB, GDBM_File, etc. There are so many of them that provide nearly the same thing. It might be nice to wrap them all up into a talk of some sort.
Re:Thought provokers
waltman on 2007-07-06T18:06:11
If we're going to have more workshoppy sessions at PPW, I think a good one would be perl in science. The bio folks have bioperl, but for more math and engineering stuff I get the impression that the python folks are kicking our butt with SciPy.Re:Thought provokers
Stevan on 2007-07-06T19:04:40
As such, I'd like to see some Moose workshops since it was under-represented at this year's YAPC.Sorry, I decided to go to YAPC::EU this year instead. I will be giving a Moose talk there (an expended version of the PerlSemNY one I did about a month ago), and Yuval Kogman will be giving a more general Meta{object, class, programming} talk which will touch on Moose as well. Of course all talks will be posted online as well, so the folks at home can follow along.
- Stevan
