YAPC::Israel::2005

Feedback

The main fuel of volunteers - both as speakers and as organizers - is the feedback. In order to thank those people all the effort we need to make sure we actually provide them with feedback. Good or bad. Whatever. This is important to the speakers and organizers of this event and maybe even more important to the speakers, organizers and participants of next year's event. This is the way to see, it is worth the effort.

There are at least 2 ways to provide feedback:

On the main Israel.pm mailing list (perl@perl.org.il) if you are already registered. If not, you can register here: Israel Perl Mongers mailing list
Directly to the organizers If you prefer to send it directly to one of us, you are welcome. Please note in your message if we can publish what you wrote (and you are sending it to one of us only because it is more convenent) or if you'd like to keep it private.

See this thread on the mailing list

By Felix Liberman

On Feb 17th I attended Israel Perl Conference (or more accurate YAPC::Israel::2005). By sharing my impressions I hope to help persons who missed this forum.

YAPC::Israel::2005 stands for "Yet Another Perl Conference". It was a 3rd conference in our region and (as previous years) took place at Interdisciplinary Center Herzeliya.

Among participants there were big companies representatives (including IEC guys from Intel), but it's not an obligatory to represent some company (myself is a good example) -- participation fee is moderate and in most cases (if it's relevant) covered by your employer. If you interesting to visit this forum next year - surf YAPC::Israel for details.

After short opening talks we spread into different tracks (including one for Perl beginners), while my choice was natural - "Revision Control Systems", since it was my job mainstream during last 7 years. The presenter gave short review on Revision Control tools history and compared existing Open Source solutions. Although some statements about lack of functionality in "old good" CVS were slightly exaggerated (IMHO), the practical solutions that could give "Arch-Magic" tool impressed the audience (and myself too). Next presentation of my choice has very cool topic: "Something About Parrot". We got interesting update about Perl-6 project status and role of Parrot environment in next generation programming languages. Now all rumors about Perl future became much more clear. Next presentation was devoted to web-services, and since for myself it's almost unknown field I learned interesting things about data exchange technologies. Appears that Web Services implementation in Perl using SOAP gave to web programmer very flexible solutions for wide spectrum of tasks: from automatic translation to financial calculations.

After lunch I returned to "Perl for experienced" track. I always considered joint Perl and C (or other languages) application as exotic trick that require special knowledges and lots of experience. But "Introduction to XS" lecture helped to dispel this myth. C-language add-on development technology presented there as a set of well-documented steps that does not require hacker's degree.

The last two lectures I attended were from "beginners track". It was great impression to see how many people were interested in Perl basics. Even here I found something new - how to compare files using MD5 checksum (once somebody asked me about similar problem and I borrowed the checksum solution from Perl newsgroup archive).

Trying to sum-up impression from YAPC::Israel::2005 I want to emphasize high level of presented papers and non-declining attention to Perl from programmers and managers side. My recommendation to all Perl professionals and beginners - we must meet more and exchange our knowledges.

Felix Liberman

Please send comments, questions etc. to yapc-organizers@perl.org.il