YAPC::EU 2015 - Notes
YAPC::EU 2015 is taking place in Granada, Spain. It's a beautiful city. It's also been awhile seen I've been to a YAPC.
Some impressions, mostly from the first day, on which I gave my talk.
I arrived in Granada on Monday. I did the Swiss Workshop just before, and padded it up with a few days to do the tourist bit,
so I flew in from Switzerland to Malaga and took the bus to Granada. As is usually the case, the closer one gets to the conference
venue, familiar faces start showing up.
Once I settled in the hotel, I joined the telegram group and joined some of the mongers to dinner and some socializing.
I spent Tuesday doing my own walking tour of the some of the sites. I went to the registration and opening, and later went on an evening tour I booked
that included dinner, a flamenco show and a walking tour in the old part of town. Both were very enjoyable and I'll put up some photos on my flickr.
Wednesday was the first day of the YAPC. I missed most of Tara Andrews' keynote about programming in the field of medieval history. However I attended the same talk in the Swiss Workshop a few days before, and enjoyed it. There was at least one previous YAPC I attended where I heard a talk she gave about using Perl in some aspect of her research of ancient documents, and the talk was informative and enjoyable just as the previous ones were.
Then it came time for my own talk. It was about using genetic algorithms in sound synthesis. It was an extension of a talk I originally gave as part of an electro-accoustics course I finished last year. The crowd in that course was not my usual crowd for Perl talks. Curiously, in Israeli Perl events, we do the talks in Hebrew, but we write the presentations in English. Some of the terminology is in English, the code is LTR. I guess it's a way to avoid BIDI issues.
However when I presented to electro-accoustics classmates, I wrote a presentation in Hebrew. On Monday night I realized that that was the version I brought with me here. I had two choices, I could just leave it that way. My presentation slides are not very verbose, mostly the bullet points. And code is code. The other choice was translating it. I opted for the latter.
I felt the talk went well. The audience had good questions and good comments. For some of the questions I had good answers. Not for all of them. I will write this up when I get back home and post it here. During the presentation I mentioned some of my musical background. Larry Wall remarked that he plays the violin. So I learned at least one new thing.
I attended a couple of other talks. The day's program ended with Ovid's keynote entitled Turning Points. He spoke, among other things, about Perl's image and how it changed over the years. There's one phrase from his talk that I might adopt: Perl is Battle-Tested.
To sum it up - feels good to attend a YAPC again.
the Hat Stand -
a place to hang my many hats
