Conference Surveys

YAPC::Europe 2012 - Survey Results

Introduction

The following survey results are a simple presentation of the raw data. No attempt has been made to analyse the data and compare with previous years. See forthcoming PDFs for more in depth analysis.

Click on pie charts to view larger image version.

Demographics

These questions will help us understand who our attendees are.

Attendees:

Age Band:

Job Type:

If your position covers many roles, please base this on your most senior responsibility. Also base this on the role you perform, rather than your job title. For example, a 'QA Developer' would be a 'Developer' role, and 'Information Manager' would a Manager role (Technical or Non-Technical depending upon your responsibilites)

If 'Other' please enter your professional job role or title:

• Consultant
• IT tech support (level 2)
• Technology Consultant

Industry:

If you or your company undertake work within mulitple industry sectors, please select the primary one you are currently working within.

If 'Other' please enter your industry sector:

• all sectors
• Biotech
• Consultant
• Consulting
• Library systems

Region:

Please note this is the region you were a resident in, prior to attending the conference.

The Perl Community, YAPCs & Workshops

These questions are designed to help us understand our attendees level of involvement in the Perl community.

How do you rate your Perl knowledge?

How many previous YAPCs have you attended?

How many Perl Workshops have you attended?

Do you plan to attend a future YAPC/Workshop?

If no, could you tell us why?

Particularly if this is your first YAPC, we would like to understand why you would not be able or interested in attending another event like it.

• Distance
• No longer interested in learning Perl for anything more than occasional scripting - got the impression that it lags behind other languages/platforms in support for building complex high performance / throughput applications.
• Time constraints. Maybe also financal issues if $company isn't paying

Are you a member of a local Perl Mongers user group?

If not, do you plan to find one or start one?

What other areas of the Perl Community do you contribute to?

If 'Other' please enter your area of contribution

• Board member of YEF
• I talk at work about Perl
• Jointly run blogs.perl.org
• little patches to rakudo/perl6 spec/...
• Local Perl courses
• organise monthly socials
• stick up for Perl when people compare it to COBOL; send people to Modern Perl resources
• trainer
• write docs and wikis

YAPC::Europe 2012

Regarding YAPC::Europe 2012 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany specifically, please answer the following as best you can.

When did you decide to come to this conference?

If 'Other', what else helped you decide?

• announcement at German Perl Workshop
• blogs.perl.org
• can't recall
• I'd just realized it was about time to visit YAPC finally
• IRC
• not long before the conference and since it is located close to my place
• sponsored to attend the Perl Reunification Conference in Perl, Germany the week before (otherwise couldn't have afforded it)
• wanted to go and combined visit to my brother in Stuttgart
• when $company decided to pay for it

Were you a speaker?

Note that "similar conferences" includes other YAPCs, as well as Linux, Open Source or large technical events such as workshops.

If you were a speaker, would you have been able to attend if you hadn't been speaking?

If you weren't a speaker, would you consider speaking at a future conference?

What was your motivation for coming?

If 'Other', what else motivated you to attend?

• be at a YAPC
• Chance to visit a YAPC without long travel
• get some tuits from Wendy
• I'm a member of Frankfurt.PM, so i'm a Orga
• to see what YAPC is about

What aspects of the conference do you feel gave value for money?

If 'Other', what else did you think was value for money?

• food and drink at the venue
• Larry Wall

* Note that conference bag implies the collection of items given to the attendees when they register, even if no physical bag is provided :)

Did you have holiday planned around your conference attendance?

Were there any talks you wanted to see, but missed due to clashes in the schedule?

If 'Yes', which talks did you miss?

There are always conflicts in the schedule, as it's difficult to know what everyone would like to see. However, if you could list a few talks that you missed, it would give speakers an idea whether it would be worth updating their talks for future events.

Additional comments:

• all talks by mst, t0m's talk
• Anything related to perl 5.14/5.16 internal changes.
• can't remember but I had at least 1 clash.
• don't recall
• Don't remember, sorry
• I don't remember.
• There were a few, I didn't make a note of which.
• There were several times when I either had no particular interest in any of the talks or was interested in two, three or even all of them. I think that this happened mostly due to the lack of themed tracks (sysadmin, web, ...), or tracks for different levels of Perl knowledge.

Were there any speakers not present, who you would like to have seen at the conference?

If 'Yes', which speakers?

Additional comments:

• None from Europe, I know :-)
• Damian Conway from Down Under;-)
• Chuck Norris
• osfameron had talks about Arduino, which would have been interesting. But I know he couldn't attend the conference at all. Too bad. It happens.
• the talk about Arduino

What kinds of talks would you prefer at future conferences?

Are there any topics you would specifically like to see featured?

• Getting from 0 to Perl (plus lots of marketing to get non-Perl-people to go to YAPC, attend this talk(s) (on the first day), and then enjoy the rest)
• Hands-on talks about how people do stuff (so no theoretical pseudo-code, but the real nitty-gritty-stuff)
• System, low-level stuff, C programming. There were interesting talks in these domains this year.
• Other programming languages that explore uncommon programming methods, like vaxman's talk about array programming.
• Actually, apart from the "descriptions" of the talks I'd like to see the talks delivered as promoted in the descriptions. Going to some super-duper named talk in an advanced topic and hearing the presenter rant about something else for 20 mins and hearing "ooh, how I forgot to prepare the slides" is not professional. Also, if you'll just describe me an api of some random module in a talk named "how to jump into hyperspace" I can just RTFM myself instead of wasting my 20/40 mins. So, make the talks advanced but also make the content on the talk match that subject
• always the latest, greatest, what people are working on etc. I'm so glad I know about p5-MOP now - probably wouldn't have found out for quite a while otherwise
• Dependency injection, automated refactoring, deployment (packaging, automation), continuous integration, monitoring
• deployment practices in Perl-based projects of different size, including DB-related practices (updating/downgrading schema, converting data etc.)
• devops, deployment, etc
• GUI applications (Tk, GTK, WxWidgets, ...)
• GUI programming
• GUI's, Video/Game development, graphical stuff, audio
• How to write good software ;-). In earnest, concrete examples (yes code) showing good solutions, good patterns solving concrete problems - showing what you can do with Perl in a *good* way. What about calling it 'cooking talks' ?
• I'd love to see a beginners track again
• It would be good if there was a clear indicator to the level of each talk. Such that each be classified as begginner/intermediate/advanced/historical, so that you don't accidentally end up sat in a talk that isn't really relevant for you.
• monitoring and automatisation
• Moose, POE, PERL6
• MOP and Moose Dancer
• More Perl 6 - this conference seemed to be Perl 6 light.
• Network and security
• Non-technical talks
• Perl 5 and Perl 6 together (the future, transitions between them etc)
• Perl grammar, natural language processing
• Perl internals
• Perl internals, Perl XS
• Perl with object databases Async with Perl (more user stories, our company did X)
• Software engineering, design patterns,
• wxPerl

How do you rate the conference?

How would you rate your overall satisfaction of the following areas of the conference?

Key:

1 = Very Satisfied
2 = Somewhat satisfied
3 = Somewhat un-satisfied
4 = Very un-satisfied
5 = N/A

The Conference Fee

In order to help future organisers gauge an appropriate conference fee, how much would you (or your company) have paid for a conference ticket? Feel free to provide an answer for all rates, where corporate rate would be paid for by your company (including a Master Class place), standard rate would be the regular price paid by attendees in paid employment, and lastly the concession rate for anyone who holds proof that they are in fulltime education or are unemployed.

Corporate Rate:

Standard Rate:

Concession Rate:

How did you pay for the conference fee?