The best-kept secret in programming conferences, especially in a down economy
Posted by Tom Moertel Fri, 22 May 2009 05:59:00 GMT
I know, the economy sucks, and everything is expensive these days. It’s even worse for you, a polyglot programmer with a serious programming-language obsession. You prowl Proggit, lounge at LtU, and occasionally step on over to Stack Overflow. But it’s just not enough. You need more. You need to hang out in meatspace with other fascinating programmers, diving into modern object systems, getting mechanical with crazy VMs, hacking on code like the wild code-hacking beast that you are.
Sure, it’s a nice dream and all, but how are you going to make it happen? And even if you could in theory make it happen, how could you afford to do it now, in this down economy?
Well, my friend, let me share a secret: You can make it happen. And you can afford it. Here’s how: Just be at the 10th Anniversary Yet Another Perl Conference. It’s day upon day upon day of jam-packed programming-language goodness of all sorts, not “just” Perl – and this year it’s the one conference you can afford.
Seriously, I did a little price-checking, and YAPC is about the most underpriced programming-fest on the planet:
| Conference | Price |
| JavaOne | $1,995 |
| RailsConf | 895 |
| PyCon | 450 |
| RubyConf | 200 |
| YAPC | 125 |
Wait, you’re not into Perl? No problem. The Perl community has always embraced diversity, and there’s a lot more than just Perl at YAPC. Check out the tag cloud for talks and you’ll see what I’m saying. At YAPC, the good stuff comes in enormous buckets, plenty for programming aficionados of all stripes. Here’s a taste:
- There’s the Parrot Virtual Machine Workshop. That’s right, YAPC comes front-loaded with a thunderous, 2-day, under-the-hood hackfest, all devoted to a modern VM – Parrot – that’s optimized for your favorite dynamic languages.
- You’re serious about keeping track of your code, right? Well, YAPC’s got talks about Git, too.
- Into objects? Then consider a barrel of talks about the Moose object system, which builds upon great ideas from Perl 6, CLOS (of LISP fame), Smalltalk, Java, BETA, OCaml, and Ruby – and sports roles, delegation, and a meta-object protocol.
- Are you into testing? Well, Perl culture is positively infected with testing. At YAPC|10, there are half a dozen talks about it. (Also: find out why you ought to be harnessing the power of TAP, even if you never program in Perl.)
- And, of course, there’s a little Haskell love, too: What Haskell did to my brain.
See, YAPC is for you.
Am I trying to persuade you to join us at YAPC? Yes. But I’m only doing it because I care about you. YAPC is a fascinating conference, packed with hackers from around the world, all eager to share interesting things, things many you would find delightful, if only you knew about them. So I’m letting you know about them, right now, so you don’t miss out.
Do yourself a favor. If you can figure out how to get your brain to Pittsburgh in the 4th week of June 2009 – yes, only 4 weeks away – then by all means register now for YAPC|10. It’s a great conference at a great price, and it’s something no discriminating hacker ought to be denied.
I hope to see you at YAPC|10.
readers
sigh. Came here to read about something interesting and it’s just a Perl advertisement. Would you mind keeping this off planet haskell?
Programmer – I didn’t put this post on Planet Haskell; I added it to my blog. Planet Haskell, it would seem, pulls my full feed.
In any case, I’d wager that many Planet Haskell readers – but not you, clearly – would find something interesting in this post. There was a big injection of Haskell ideas into the Perl community back when Pugs was taking off. Many of those ideas took hold, and lots of Perl people got into Haskell. I suspect that more than a few Planet Haskell readers will be at YAPC this year.
But not you, sadly. Still, I’m sure you’re a swell guy. And, because I feel for you, I’m going to give you a present, a special Planet Haskell feed that doesn’t include my posts. Here you go: Planet Haskell without Tom Moertel’s posts. Just subscribe to that feed, and you won’t have to worry about me tainting the purity of your PH experience ever again.
Best of luck to you.
Cheers! —Tom
Most planets let you give them a tag-filtered feed; i.e. list of recent posts tagged Haskell. This is generally considered good etiquette on topic-based planets. Cheers!
Edward, thanks for your comment.
You are, of course, right. That’s why I pointed out that PH is pulling my whole feed, not just the Haskell-tagged subset.
I trust that whoever added my blog to PH had their reasons for including the whole thing. Before my new job, I wrote a lot more about Haskell – something I hope to get back to soon – and maybe back then my “off-Haskell” posts were considered interesting enough (or infrequent enough) to merit full-feed inclusion. And as Planet Haskell is about the community more than the language, itself, I guess including some off-topic content is intentional.
In any case, if the PH curators would prefer to pull just the haskell-tagged subset, I’m fine with that. I just want to be part of a happy community, that’s all.
Planet Haskell is explicitly not just Haskell, but blogs by people from the Haskell community. Anonymous Programmer posting above is out of line.
I am going to this YAPC for the first time ever. I have been lurking on different Perl sites for years and have been using Perl professionally for about two years. I used to write emacs macros back in 1989, and some of the stuff I can do in Perl reminds me of that power. I have lazily followed some of the development of Haskell for a few years - I may actually learn some someday - and it is interesting that the first time I heard of Haskell was an article referring to Pugs. Anyway, maybe I’ll see you there.
Charles, I’m glad you can make it to YAPC this year. You’re going to have a bucket of fun. I’ll keep my eye open for you, too. It’s always great meeting new people at YAPC.
Cheers! —Tom
FYI, the price quoted for PyCon is the “at door” “corporate” rate. If you were a hacker/hobbiest type that early-birded, you were able to get in for almost half of the price quoted ($250). It’s still twice the price quoted for YAPC, but I didn’t want folks thinking PyCon was too out of line with the conferences of it’s short.
William, that’s a good point. As far as I’m concerned, PyCon, RubyConf, and YAPC are all absolute steals, especially when compared to conferences like JavaOne.
(insert some lame remark about transatlantic flights needing to come down to match)
You misunderstand me. I like the posts on your blog. Rather then taking your feed off, or your non-haskell posts off, I would rather a flag was just in that says “if it’s about Perl it doesn’t show up”. I hate the language and don’t want to hear anything about it (except if it finally went away). But failing that, at least given a warning in the title would be a kindness. :)
“Programmer” you are getting on my proverbial tits!
Could you please provide a clear flag on all the comments that you keep leaving on Perl blogs so that we can filter them out ;-)
There is a YAPC::EU too! It also is moderately priced. I am pretty sure it is under 100 euros this year as well. I have been twice and it is a lot of fun just like Tom says.
(Is it okay to make comments about perl on this blog? I would hate to upset anyone.)
RubyManor was a lousy £8 this year. And everyone still got free beer afterwards!