use Perl

Till the end of this year our community is hosting three Perl Workshops, maybe not too big in sense of attendees number, but very important in geographical aspect.

These are:
Far East Perl Workshop in Vladivostok, 26 September;
Belorussian Perl Workshop “BY Perl” in Minsk, 18 October and
3rd Russian Perl Workshop “South Perl” in Rostov-On-Don, 1 November.

From my point of view (I look at every event with the eyes of organizer) “South Perl” Workshop is interesting because it was fully initiated by local Perl monger group, RostovOnDon.pm, and was inspired by “May Perl” conference.

“Far East” and “BY Perl” are very attractive as well, and I will tell about how they went later.

We all want to see foreign attendees (both speakers and listeners) at each of our events, and hope that visa problems will not stop those who want to help spreading the word of Perl.

I have launched the yapc.tv website, which is intended to collect videos from Perl events we all organize.

I am not quite sure what will it be in a month of a year, but currently I am (very slowly) adding videos that were made at YAPC::Europe 2008 in Copenhagen, starting from lightning talks.

There are some ideas how to make video recodings more cool (all current ones suck in different aspects). I am going to implement one brilliant idea at Italian Perl Workshop in September if the organizers allow me do that :-)

Special thanks to Henrik Tougaard, who had presented me a tripod to replace one I forget at home.

By the way, perl.tv domain was already registered, but I find yapc.tv name very nice.

P. S. If anyone can offer of suggest hosting where I could freely put large FLV files, please let me know. The problem is that foreign traffic is free for me untill it is less than traffic which goes inside Russia. Google, YouTube, Vimeo etc. are quite good but there I will not be able to manipulate video transformations as I wish.

Anatoly Sharifulin, the leader of RostovOnDon.pm, has translated brian's guide on solving any Perl problem into Russian. We've published it in both HTML and POD versions.

This translation is very close to the original text, and a couple of items are translated quite interesting. First, the The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was localized with Russian TV-reality. Second, several occurences of noun "master" (a word, which has no suitable direct translation) was translated with a word "guru", which became the synonym to "master" in the last two years for poiting to publicly known IT-specialist here in Russia. Well, to be honest, previous translation also used this word, and two interpreters found that translation independently — that is a real linguistic phenomenon :-)

Last couple of days I was in rush with gathering more reasons to host YAPC Europe in Moscow.

And here are our 13 reasons!

We have changed the date of Russian Far East Perl Workshop, moving it one week further. The new date is 26 September, it's Friday.

We joined our event to the Coastal Internet-Forum (PRIF-2008), which happens to happen on 22-26th of September, the dates very close to our initial dates of the workshop.

We are still a separate event, and after joining to PRIF we gain in having a venue equipped with desktop computers, projector and internet access. And it also potentially can attract more people for the workshop.

Thanks to Linux Centre & Linux Format for suggesting to join the event in Vladivostok.

andy.sh writes "

One of my colleagues, Andrey Zavyalov, has organized the Golf contest at YAPC::Russia in May. Another one, Anatoly Sharifulin, helped me with cutting video and preparing a scratch for subtitles.

So today I can show the result of all that work, a YAPC::Russia::Golf's three-page website and six-minute video with English subtitles. I think that that contest was one of the most fascinating element of the conference, and we will continue with it next year.

My work here was preparing subtitle text and having a thought that both video and sound suck. But if you don't speak Russian you can read subtitles and see the slides in plain text that appears on the right to the player.

"

Conferences are attractive because you receive a goodies bag there :-) I know what is the most useful thing which should appear there. This is a face list (or, hmm, face sheet) with photos of attendees, their names, nicknames and PM-groups. All printed in colour on hard paper.

Like this: http://yapcrussia.org/temp/yapcfaces.jpg

Might be cool, isn't it? Especially at previous YAPC of 2007 name aimed to socialize people.

I am happy to announce the Second Russian Perl Workshop which is called "Far East Perl" and takes place on 13th of September in Vladivostok.

Official website was just launched: http://fe2008.perlrussia.ru/.

Vladivostok is a city in the far far Eastern part of Russia, and is close to Japan, Korea and China.
http://perlrussia.ru/img/fe2008-map.gif

Local organization forces of the workshop are Vladivostok.pm and CSmile company.

DeepText company proposes a minigrant of 1000 € to Jonathan Worthington for working 40 hours on Rakudo development during July and August of 2008. The purpose of the grant is to support implementing as many of multiple dispatch abilities in Perl 6 design as possible to code having these working hours.

Here are initial proposal and Jonathan’s answer.

Proposal from DeepText

Jonathan, DeepText company proposes you one thousand euros minigrant for working on Rakudo, Perl 6 compiler on top of Parrot virtual machine. Grant period lasts two months, starts on 1st of July and ends 31st of August 2008. During these two months you should work on Rakudo totally 40 hours (either spread it equally to have 5 hours a week, or 1 hour a day, or group hours as you wish).

Work progress should be reported with posts on rakudo.org project blog (and wherever else you think is appropriate) at least four times (again, the periodicity is over to you: either one note each two weeks, or four posts in the end of August).

Before 1st of July please prepare the list of topics you are going to implement under this grant and which needs approximately 40 hours of programming.

Topics might be close to those you work under other Perl 6 grants but should not intersect with them too much. The most desired variant is to implement a particular part of Synopsis or particular set of “official” Perl 6 tests within PUGS. The list of topics will be considered as a roadmap and may be changed by you at any time if some reasons raise.

The proposal ends in the end of Summer and does not assume silent prolongation.

DeepText is a company established primarily for organizing Perl events in Russian-speaking areas and supporting Perl community there.

Roadmap from Jonathan Worthington

After talking with Patrick and looking at the roadmap and things, I’m pondering that it might be good to give the 40 hours to working on multiple dispatch. A *lot* of things hang on multi-dispatch:

* multi subs and multi methods (duh!)

* Operator overloading is very dependent upon this (but also on parser stuff for declaring new operators)

* Junction auto-threading

At present, we have a sorta-working-ish multiple dispatch, apart from it only sort of works. For example, it doesn’t pay any attention to roles and constraints. But more serious, I think the candidate sorting is also different from what S12 specifies, which means at the moment we probably sometimes would dispatch to the wrong thing. Then there’s no support for “is default,” proto, and so forth. So there’s a lot of (in places I expect quite tricky) work to do here.

Published at http://deeptext.net/news/perl6-minigrant/

WHAT IS IT
YAPC::Russia "May Perl" is a Perl-conference that took place on 17th and 18th of May, 2008 in Moscow.
http://2008.perlrussia.ru/

THE NAME
This event is another one in a series of Perl events organized by Moscow.pm group. The first one was "Perl Today", the first Russian Perl Workshop last year, the second (together with Kiev.pm) - first Ukrainian Perl Workshop in February.

Initially the plan was to host just a second Russian Perl Workshop "May Perl" but then the name and status of the event were broaden and became YAPC::Russia "May Perl" 2008. Despite this change we managed to save the date which was announced earlier. We only moved it one day later to fit it within weekend instead of Friday.

VENUE
I asked in a mailing list of Moscow.pm if someone could help to find a venue of amphitheatre style. In a couple of "peer-to-peer" steps we met with a guy from the Club "Business in .RU-style" which is a part of State University-Higher School of Economics. They proposed us to take one of the auditoriums of such type. Later I asked for one more auditorium to host a second thread of talks.

TALKS
Number of talks is at the same time good and bad element. It it good because we had to find second auditorium for one of days, bad is that attendees sometimes wanted to be at both at the same time.

There were several 20 to 40-minutes talks and one longer master-class devoted to using POE. By the way, despite that master-class was moved into a second room, it was preceded by a 20-minute talk in the main room.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/_MG_4515.JPG

One of the speakers received a special prize for the most balanced talk (in the sense of organizers, well, me personally).
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/DSC_0698-webbig.jpg

We had three cameras recording the conference (but unfortunately did not manage to organize good sound recording).
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/DSC_0685-webbig.jpg

ATTENDEES AND GEOGRAPHY
241 people were registered on a website, about 100 of them showed up. It is not possible to say real number because not everyone has checked in their registration desk in the venue: either just missed it or did not appear in the first day.

The list of participants includes three countries (Russia, Ukraine and Denmark), about 20 cities and attendees of all ages.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/IMG_4579.JPG

REGISTRATION
From the very start of Moscow.pm events the registration process was automated with personal barcodes, which were sent to attendees several days before the event and which should be printed and brought to the venue to speed up registration process.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/_MG_4443.JPG

FREE STUFF
Participation in a conference was free for everyone, and even more: there were two free coffee-breaks, one per day. We also had a possibility to give everyone a conference's T-shirt (thanks to Act that allows to see T-shirt size statistics). We also had free Wi-Fi (but it did not work too well in the first day).
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/DSC_0564-web.jpg

LIGHTNING TALKS
Thanks to Alex Kapranoff, the conference was "equipped" with a lightning session of 10 talks. By the way, we have localized the name and call them "blitz-talks" (well, word is German but is pronounced much easier than "lightning" by local people). Several months earlier Alex had prepared web pages explaining what LTs are (http://perl.lv/lt). Later he lobbied LT session on another IT-conference in Moscow.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/IMG_4585.JPG

Funny thing is the localization of the Gong. We had this musical triangle to stop talks.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/IMG_4616.JPG

YAPC::RUSSIA::GOLF
At the registration desk every attendee received a printed schedule and extra two pages with tasks for the contest, YAPC::Russia::Golf. Its name tells that it is like traditional Perl Golf contest. We gave two algorithmical tasks to be solved with minimum of code. Winners were announced in the end of second day of the conference. Tasks and solutions are located at contest's website http://golf.yapcrussia.org/, and this page will be later expanded to include comments to solutions, as well as video recordings of the process.

There were four prized: three one year VPS hosting packages and a license for ActiveStates' Perl Dev Kit.

http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/_MG_4561.JPG (thinking of the task)
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/IMG_4735.JPG (analyzing solutions)
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/DSC_0705-webbig.jpg (getting the prize)

MISTAKES
Several mistakes were made during the conference itself and during the preparation to it. Well, they did not break the conference, but are rather things to take more care of next time.

While the registration was automated with barcodes (which eliminates the difficulties of speech channel for parsing attendee's names in a noisy room) it was dramatically slowed down because of need to search the badge, it was slow even while we had sorted them alphabetically.

Next time we have to be more strict when accepting talks. There were several which could be deleted. Unfortunately two speakers did not showed up at all.

Coffee-breaks were great, but lunches were not. We planned one hour lunch each day. But in the first day we (organizers and several people came with us to a cafe outside the venue) spent two hours there (but talks were continued during this lunch, although with a delay). Along with this and problems with Wi-Fi second part of POE master-class was abandoned.

We had prepared lots of AC supplies (in fact, wires are just a part of organizers' toolkit). Next time we should add to our own stuff several wireless microphones to be more flexible in the room.

ORGANIZERS AND SPONSORS
Again huge thanks to Russian search engine Rambler (http://rambler.ru/) who was the Prime sponsor. Personal thanks to Alex Kapranof (Rambler), Ivan Serezhkin (another search engine, Yandex, http://yandex.ru/) and Andrey Zavyalov who helped with Golf contest. Coincidently, both Alex and Ivan work in web-mail and anti-spam divisions, but in different companies. Thanks to Anatoly Sharifulin with whom we made budges last night before the conference.

Thanks to ZSupport (http://zsupport.ru/) company who created and solved problems with Wi-Fi support, and most of others - to the Club "Business in a .RU-style" (http://styleru.net/) and personally to Michael Monashev who pointed me to these people and Peter Fedin for organizing the venue and coffee-breaks.

Bonus slide: Ivan Serezhkin vs. R. Geoffrey Avery
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/avery-vany.jpg

WHAT IS IT
YAPC::Russia "May Perl" is a Perl-conference that took place on 17th and 18th of May, 2008 in Moscow.
http://2008.perlrussia.ru/

THE NAME
This event is another one in a series of Perl events organized by Moscow.pm group. The first one was "Perl Today", the first Russian Perl Workshop last year, the second (together with Kiev.pm) - first Ukrainian Perl Workshop in February.

Initially the plan was to host just a second Russian Perl Workshop "May Perl" but then the name and status of the event were broaden and became YAPC::Russia "May Perl" 2008. Despite this change we managed to save the date which was announced earlier. We only moved it one day later to fit it within weekend instead of Friday.

VENUE
I asked in a mailing list of Moscow.pm if someone could help to find a venue of amphitheatre style. In a couple of "peer-to-peer" steps we met with a guy from the Club "Business in .RU-style" which is a part of State University-Higher School of Economics. They proposed us to take one of the auditoriums of such type. Later I asked for one more auditorium to host a second thread of talks.

TALKS
Number of talks is at the same time good and bad element. It it good because we had to find second auditorium for one of days, bad is that attendees sometimes wanted to be at both at the same time.

There were several 20 to 40-minutes talks and one longer master-class devoted to using POE. By the way, despite that master-class was moved into a second room, it was preceded by a 20-minute talk in the main room.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/_MG_4515.JPG

One of the speakers received a special prize for the most balanced talk (in the sense of organizers, well, me personally).
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/DSC_0698-webbig.jpg

We had three cameras recording the conference (but unfortunately did not manage to organize good sound recording).
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/DSC_0685-webbig.jpg

ATTENDEES AND GEOGRAPHY
241 people were registered on a website, about 100 of them showed up. It is not possible to say real number because not everyone has checked in their registration desk in the venue: either just missed it or did not appear in the first day.

The list of participants includes three countries (Russia, Ukraine and Denmark), about 20 cities and attendees of all ages.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/IMG_4579.JPG

REGISTRATION
From the very start of Moscow.pm events the registration process was automated with personal barcodes, which were sent to attendees several days before the event and which should be printed and brought to the venue to speed up registration process.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/_MG_4443.JPG

FREE STUFF
Participation in a conference was free for everyone, and even more: there were two free coffee-breaks, one per day. We also had a possibility to give everyone a conference's T-shirt (thanks to Act that allows to see T-shirt size statistics). We also had free Wi-Fi (but it did not work too well in the first day).
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/DSC_0564-web.jpg

LIGHTNING TALKS
Thanks to Alex Kapranoff, the conference was "equipped" with a lightning session of 10 talks. By the way, we have localized the name and call them "blitz-talks" (well, word is German but is pronounced much easier than "lightning" by local people). Several months earlier Alex had prepared web pages explaining what LTs are (http://perl.lv/lt). Later he lobbied LT session on another IT-conference in Moscow.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/IMG_4585.JPG

Funny thing is the localization of the Gong. We had this musical triangle to stop talks.
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/IMG_4616.JPG

YAPC::RUSSIA::GOLF
At the registration desk every attendee received a printed schedule and extra two pages with tasks for the contest, YAPC::Russia::Golf. Its name tells that it is like traditional Perl Golf contest. We gave two algorithmical tasks to be solved with minimum of code. Winners were announced in the end of second day of the conference. Tasks and solutions are located at contest's website http://golf.yapcrussia.org/, and this page will be later expanded to include comments to solutions, as well as video recordings of the process.

There were four prized: three one year VPS hosting packages and a license for ActiveStates' Perl Dev Kit.

http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/_MG_4561.JPG (thinking of the task)
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/IMG_4735.JPG (analyzing solutions)
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/DSC_0705-webbig.jpg (getting the prize)

MISTAKES
Several mistakes were made during the conference itself and during the preparation to it. Well, they did not break the conference, but are rather things to take more care of next time.

While the registration was automated with barcodes (which eliminates the difficulties of speech channel for parsing attendee's names in a noisy room) it was dramatically slowed down because of need to search the badge, it was slow even while we had sorted them alphabetically.

Next time we have to be more strict when accepting talks. There were several which could be deleted. Unfortunately two speakers did not showed up at all.

Coffee-breaks were great, but lunches were not. We planned one hour lunch each day. But in the first day we (organizers and several people came with us to a cafe outside the venue) spent two hours there (but talks were continued during this lunch, although with a delay). Along with this and problems with Wi-Fi second part of POE master-class was abandoned.

We had prepared lots of AC supplies (in fact, wires are just a part of organizers' toolkit). Next time we should add to our own stuff several wireless microphones to be more flexible in the room.

ORGANIZERS AND SPONSORS
Again huge thanks to Russian search engine Rambler (http://rambler.ru/) who was the Prime sponsor. Personal thanks to Alex Kapranof (Rambler), Ivan Serezhkin (another search engine, Yandex, http://yandex.ru/) and Andrey Zavyalov who helped with Golf contest. Coincidently, both Alex and Ivan work in web-mail and anti-spam divisions, but in different companies. Thanks to Anatoly Sharifulin with whom we made badges last night before the conference.

Thanks to ZSupport (http://zsupport.ru/) company who created and solved problems with Wi-Fi support, and most of others - to the Club "Business in a .RU-style" (http://styleru.net/) and personally to Michael Monashev who pointed me to these people and Peter Fedin for organizing the venue and coffee-breaks.

Photos in this message with names started from DSC_ are made by Alex.

Bonus slide: Ivan Serezhkin vs. R. Geoffrey Avery
http://perlrussia.ru/mayperl2008/shots/avery-vany.jpg