Dear Monks,

I'd just like to briefly mention YAPC::Asia which was held last week in Tokyo. Follow the link to the English page which has a list of speakers and sessions, and temporary links to slides and audio. (A video camera was set up so that data is to go online.) As of this posting the links are: slides and audio files (heavy page).

It was my first YAPC and quite interesting, if anything I wished all the sessions were longer. Also it was held on weekdays so I couldn't see all the sessions. Larry, Damian and others came from overseas plus there were many Japanese presenters. In fact, all seats sold out in 5 days, and I was only able to get in by sneaking over to the English registration page (an intentional loophole I heard). O'Reilly and Japanese companies including Hatena.ne.jp (a blog site) and Mixi.jp (a social networking site), Yahoo! Japan, Six Apart, Cybozu Labs (business software) and Brazil (razil.jp, they make open source software including the full text search engine Senna and the web crawler Xango, and search big chat sites) were sponsors. I heard it was done on a shoestring, without making profit themselves (except O'Reilly's table selling a ton of Japanese Perl books, which was nice to see).

So I guess it costs quite a lot to put one of these things on, since it was about 40 bucks for the two days and then another 40 for the (very delicious Chinese style) dinner. The show was held in Kamata, which is on the Southern side of Tokyo between the Yamanote loop line and the ocean, and is a bit on the industrial side perhaps. The building itself was a wild postmodern sculpture that looked like a fragment fell off of an alien spaceship, and I was glad they didn't pick someplace in the middle of say Shibuya since that would undoubtedly have added a lot to the entrance fee. I'd say it was well worth what I paid.

However we also got free two great T-shirts and a nice umbrella in a Yahoo! Japan bag! Also I took advantage of it being in a community hall where a library offered lots of Internet time for under $1 (best kept secret at YAPC::Asia I'm sure) and also there was WLAN which apparently worked for everyone but Ingy. One interesting thing was that the sponsors were also developers and very approachable, and they are both good-sized services that use Perl. Also there were a bunch of Livedoor people there, Livedoor is a big portal site and also infamous for its currently imprisoned management. In particular I was happy to see Catalyst being used heavily (I think it was in Hatena?) and with additional modules developed for it. My only problem was that since I shuttled between that talk (Catalyst Everywhere, IIRC) and Ingy's "Wikiwyg" talk, so I probably missed the best parts of both.

Incidentally I had also attended some months ago Lightweight Language Day and Night which was fantastic and had a great T-shirt (also O'Reilly sponsored). LL brought together "scripting language people" from perl, python, ruby, smalltalk, and so on, which enabled a cool JAPH-like competition to see how each language worked out (smalltalk was the neatest I think with an animated output). So YAPC had some of the same people there I'm sure, and indeed with Ruby coming from Japan it was mentioned prominently by a number of speakers, including Larry who said that Ruby took the best from Perl5 and now Perl6 was taking the best from Ruby and then some. Also interesting was Larry's summarization of many languages in a single sentence expressing an idiosyncracy of each language's designer and how the language makes you think. So while Prolog was "Everything is a theory", and Perl was IIRC "TMTOWTDI", Python was IIRC "There is only one way to do it, our way." I guess there is a good deal of rivalry with the Python camp still.

If another is held again it would be nice if demos could be given, if presentations could be longer or more numerous, and if there was a way to network with other participants. Even so there was a strong sense of individual personalities, especially with Ingy's talks (including a lot of Javascript and making things "wierd enough") and a trend in which many presenters took on Takahashi's challenge by making their slides use 200 point fonts (Larry says, "Takahashi it!") and a big dose of humor. I didn't know there wouldn't be simultaneous translation (no budget) but would have volunteered if I'd known, however between the subtitles and lots of bilingual people I think everybody came away satisfied with the enthusiasm and information exchange.

A lot of Perl6 was discussed, as something which is going to be great and can already be used in parts now in Perl5, and there was apparently a Perl6 Hackathon held after the YAPC, though this was not it seems a very public event so I don't know the results of that yet.

If you want to brush up on your Japanese you may like to check out the audio (and maybe video later). I know I am hoping to see slides of some sessions I missed too. Now I know what the fervor about YAPC is all about, and I'm glad I finally got a chance to meet Larry and Damian and say "Thank You". I also got a chance to meet some great people on the Japan side, both Japanese and foreigners (including a programmer at NTT and another at a securities firm), and am sure this will make developing in Perl a lot more fun for me in the future too.

Update: After posting a long reply to my own thread which is not a very classy thing to do I might add, I viewed a slide show (Marry Perl with Other Languages) just press space to keep going. At the end I discovered a neat thing, mouse up out of the web page itself and a nice javascript (okay XUL) slider drifts down so you can drag it through the presentation to fast forward the quickly rendered mighty font (tm) presentation.

Matt Rosin

  • Comment on My Impressions of YAPC::Asia 2006 in Tokyo

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Re: My Impressions of YAPC::Asia 2006 in Tokyo
by zentara (Cardinal) on Apr 03, 2006 at 11:31 UTC
    I look forward to the day, when we can have virtual Perl conferences, and all attend ( and even give presentations) from our homes and offices. I envision something like an assignment of 10 high bandwidth channels for the various presentations, which the subscribers can choose to watch. The presenters themselves would see a large HDTV screen with a montage of all the subscribers watching (the audience), and possibly interactive "question-answer" sessions.

    Once we all get fiber-optics........ which sure is taking a long time.......probably due to the political inertia of the cable and phone companies who want to eek out every last bit of profit from their obsolete systems.

    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
[reply]

      It's kind of a cute idea, but frankly I don't think I'd bother. I took a great deal away from listening to Elian and chromatic talk at YAPC::NA last year—but I also took a great deal from having breakfast with chip and dinner with Erudil and the andreycheks, and talking over the closing keynote with Util, and those parts wouldn't translate very well to a strictly distributed format.


      If God had meant us to fly, he would *never* have given us the railroads.
          --Michael Flanders

[reply]
        Yeah, it's kind of the same thing "home-schooled children" go thru. They still like to get together at dances, parties, and sporting events. But I'm old now, can't score unless I pay for it, don't like dressing up, and don't like travelling. To me, telecommuting is more appealing. I'll bet there is a separation with age, in who would and would-not not televised conferences.
        I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh
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Re: My Impressions of YAPC::Asia 2006 in Tokyo
by mattr (Curate) on Apr 04, 2006 at 09:44 UTC
    Well here's a long comment to this thread.. thinking back on the YAPC I have some more comments based on some things I was strongly feeling then and now.

    There is definitely something to be said both for virtual and meatspace meetings. For this conference one thing I noticed speaking both languages is that some of the humor from each side (foreigners and Japanese) did penetrate (the talks did include bilingual slides where possible), but in particular most of the Japanese geek humor did not make it over to the English side, and the lightning talks (both languages) were both hilarious (Audrey's was fabulous and hilarious) and and so fast that even native speakers had trouble keeping up - so a lot went over the heads of Japanese. I think it would be cool if they were kept online (as they will this time) so people who honestly paid the money could catch those nuances, and see the sessions they missed.

    Also, I know it was run on a shoestring and especially the foreign visitors may need to make a living doing this sort of thing too, which is why maybe all the slides won't be online possibly I hear, but certainly there must be a way for people to somehow participate intellectually and personally even if they can't come to the location. Perhaps if you pay a YAPC entrance fee you get to see all YAPC materials from around the world for a year? Or maybe pay as much as one extra conference's entrance fee for that right? Dunno.

    Of course free as in beer and CPAN and the Artistic License/GPL are also important, as long as there is some solution. Of course maybe I don't really know the actual purpose of YAPC, this was my first one after all. But it seems to me that aside from the speakers and some other diehards who can take time off and jaunt around the world, YAPC is less about lateral communication between different groups of Perl people, and more about bringing the taste of the core group to a local market.

    Which is okay, I guess, since of course it is always timely information being presented, but there could be more dialog in the community based around YAPC if it promoted a persistent, evolving dialog and participation to the extent of knowing what was discussed at faraway YAPCs. Or am I totally off? Maybe Perlmonks is the main way this lateral communication occurs. I met one new friend who is a Perl programmer living in Tokyo and it turns out he doesn't go to PM but hangs out on the perl channel (I take it maybe there is a #perl irc channel somewhere?). It was easily said but shocked me that there were these cool people programming perl in my vicinity and yet using a totally orthogonal communications protocol unknown to me! Eeek!

    Finally I think that meeting people is definitely a big part of YAPC as far as I can tell, I know a high point of my experience was Ingie dot Net giving me a one on one demo on his Apple laptop showing me how he used Javascript (Editted- Actually it is XUL, and Ingie also made is own library after deciding Takahashi's which everyone was using was not "wierd enough") to program his presentation slides.. apparently an ongoing battle to see how close to the start of the presentation the speaker actually writes his notes. Looks like a good trick to know!

    Also there was a dear moment when I remember Damian as he revealed some deep conceptual magic to Japanese Perl developers, saying "The trick is to return an object." (in his "Sufficiently Advanced Technology" talk when he was discussing how a multiplexed error message could be returned and handled differently by different functions.. and advocating the embedding of such "magical" code away from sight so that you can reduce the amount of code you need to type). When he said those words it was like light dawning, and I heard a collective "Ohhh" sigh of comprehension arise from the people around me! *shivers* I guess you had to be there. Of course I didn't catch the whole thing since I had business and just got back before that line. Have to catch the videos.

    I did think about an experience at a Java One conference I went to, to help a friend who was an organizer. They had a lightning demos kind of thing where a couple hundred Java programmers clustered around a projection screen and took turns giving really fast demos of something they had whipped up and talking about it, answering a couple of questions and then the next. My friend Andoh had made an OpenGL (sloooowly) rotatable cube on his mobile phone so I remember it. That would be a nice thing to do at YAPC. Lots of enthusiasm and fun, and you can meet people too.

    Also a long-running issue with me not just with this conference is I'd like to know who the other people coming to the event are, so I could meet up with them or something. I did meet great people but probably not even 95% of those attending, and for a newcomer to the community who doesn't even know where it is, that would be nice. There is Shibuya Perl Mongers (though the homepage was a bit old) and maybe I'll pick that up in the future too. In all I really liked the YAPC event and am looking forward to checking out the sessions I missed when the video came out. I don't know the resolution but at least you will be able to see the giant font sized lightning presentations that memed through from one session to the next, and get a feeling for what was discussed.

    Connecting that to the fiber meeting idea posted above, I guess it would be nice if you could pick up on the YAPC through the net that way and then discuss it with your local monks/mongers group, which might then produce some result and have it posted back to the world in a way everyone (including YAPC participants) could discover easily. Well, these are the rantings of an excited YAPC newbie. I guess the only cure is to go to another one huh?

[reply]
Re: My Impressions of YAPC::Asia 2006 in Tokyo
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 04, 2006 at 23:09 UTC
    Hi, I'm Junya, engineer of Hatena. I was very grad to read your detailed report. We don't use Catalyst, but we use our MVC framework called "Hatena Framework" which we made by ourselves. Naoya made a presentation about our backend system on YAPC. http://d.hatena.ne.jp/naoya/20060404/1144121846 These slides don't include much about the framework, but you can see more about our systems. Thank you.
[reply]
      Cool! Thanks for the info Junya! And sorry if I was giving out mistaken information.

      Hatena Bookmark is one of the sessions I really wanted to see but couldn't due to a meeting I had to attend away from the conference.

      By the way, I had trouble opening the pdf on my linux box (old versions - gv 3.5.8, xpdf 2.01) so will try again tomorrow.

      I'm curious how you found my post, are you a regular visitor to PM, or did a Monger find it?

[reply]
        > I'm curious how you found my post, are you a regular visitor to PM, or did a Monger find it?

        I found your article by Miyagawa-san's Hatena Bookmark.
        http://b.hatena.ne.jp/miyagawa/20060403#bookmark-1682389
        He bookmarks many articles related with YAPC.
        And yours was one of the longest articles about YAPC. I enjoyed it.

        Thank you.
[reply]
Re: My Impressions of YAPC::Asia 2006 in Tokyo
by vkon (Curate) on Apr 06, 2006 at 17:22 UTC
    any chances for some TODO-ed items at "audio page" will be actually done?

    Sorry for such a direct asking, but I would very like to hear some talks of people.
    If it's WEB-space question, I'll provide some space for it (although I expect there's something more difficult than just web space)

    In any case, thank you a lot for the service you did to the moment, I was very pleased to hear some talks already :):):)

[reply]
      Thanks, but this is not my site so I couldn't say. I don't think web space is the problem, just time. In particular I am looking forward to video if it shows up. Certainly Damian and Larry's talks seem to be on the audio page already. Also there is an rss feed. It looks like you can also download xul for some of the talks like Audrey's on LearningHaskell and his VB lightning talk which are nice in Firefox I think, Getting your feet wet with XS which plays in Explorer real nice (and seems like more than just getting your feet wet, more like sitting in the deep end for 10 minutes!), and so on. Incidentally PERL5WEBDEBUG blew me away, it is a web based debugger for perl programs!
[reply]

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