Let's go over your arguments one by one. Please note that I don't find
TPC worth the costs, so I'm partially the devils advocate.
- Perl 6 is coming out and we need to stay with the changes in
order to avoid getting blindsided
Perl 6 won't be out by at least another year, and TPC is by far
the only place where you can get that information. If your boss
knows what's going on in the Perl world, this will backfire on
you, because the boss will point out to you that you apparently
haven't kept up with Perl 6.
- You can meet more important people in 3 days at something like
this than you can in 3 years of just doing your job
Meeting people is, IMO, the most important reason to attend a
conference. Perhaps the only reason.
- Two words: Damian Conway
Damian is fun and he tickles your mind to think differently, but
I cannot find a business reason to meet him.
- The Open Source conference is right next door, so we can find out
about developments in all things OS, PHP, Apache, etc.
Perhaps. Whether this is relevant depends a lot on the nature
of your company.
- The various workshops and lightning talks are all but guaranteed
to show us optimizations that will save us a clock cycle or two,
or at lease keep us from writing the same thing that someone else
has already written on CPAN
Well, you don't have to go to a conference to find out what's
available on CPAN. You can find out what's available on CPAN in
less time it takes to drive to the airport. And I think you are
overestimating the optimizations you will be shown at the
conference.
- The very people who wrote so much of the code we're relying on
right now will be there in person. They have an incredible amount
of knowledge to share, and it would be great to be among so many
talented resources in the same place
This is more or less the same as your second point.
- The next State of the Onion
Likely to be on the web before you are back from the conference.
If I were your boss, I would ask you, "what does TPC give you that
YAPC didn't give you?". If you did go to YAPC, you would have a hard
time to convince me I should spend the money to send you to TPC too.
If you didn't ask to be send to YAPC, I'd asked you why you didn't
and waited for TPC.
Personally, I think that a conference that costs $1000 in fees, and
then you still have to pay for the tutorials doesn't belong in the
spirit of Perl and its community.(*) The most important feature of a
conference is to meet people, and that's specially important for people
new in the field. Which are often the people who don't have bosses
that will pay.
I doubt you will ever see me on TPC. Not even when O'Reilly or my boss
is willing to pay all expenses. OTOH, I will try to attend any YAPC,
be it in Europe, North-America or elsewhere - regardless whether my
boss will pay or not.
(*) Note that I am not suggesting that
O'Reilly is making large amounts of money of TPC. They
are not. Organizing TPC as it is costs a lot of money.
But, as YAPC proves, there are other ways to organize
a conference.
-- Abigail
Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
Please read these before you post! —
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
- a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
| |
For: |
|
Use: |
| & | | & |
| < | | < |
| > | | > |
| [ | | [ |
| ] | | ] |
Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.