Google Code-in – Fit the Third

27 Dec 2011 at 14:35

mdk

Google, Google Code-in

1 Comment

(Please note that the figures used in this article are from 12:00 UTC on Tuesday 27th December and they are pulled from a download of data from the Melange interface, the absolute accuracy is dependent on the people providing the data (very good IME) but will, therefore, not reflect the exact situation at the time of your perusal).

The Story Thus Far…

The Google Code-in is an initiative aimed at 13-17 year old school/college students with the idea of getting them involved with open source. Further reading can be found in the first two articles of this series: Google Code-in – Fit the First and Google Code-in – Fit the Second.

Understanding the Figures

It is now approximately five weeks (five weeks and one day totaling 36 days) since the students were allowed to start working on the tasks for this year’s Google Code-In. The initiative is set to run for a total of 57 days for the students to work on tasks with a few extra weeks (mostly before students started) where mentors and organisers have work to do, so there are 21 days of work remaining where tasks can be completed. Since the start of the project there was a further task release (16th December) where we added about 30 more tasks to the initiative.

 

Chart of Days for Google Code-in

Chart of Days for Google Code-in

 

Chart of Days for Google Code-in

Pie Chart of Days

There has been an impressive amount of work done, and tasks closed thus far.The figures I have collected are:

  1. We have eleven tasks that are currently claimed or have a claim requested, 2.82%;
  2. We have 137 tasks that are closed and completed, 35.13%; (1)
  3. There are 7 tasks currently pending review to be completed/re-opened for further work, 1.79%;
  4. There are 4 marked as needing more work completed on them, 1.03%;
  5. There are 231 tasks remaining on our lists, 59.23%;

 

Chart of Tasks Numbers and Status

Chart of Tasks Numbers and Status

 

Pie Chart of Tasks Numbers

Pie Chart of Tasks Numbers

From these figures we can say that we have completed above a third of all the possible tasks we had for this year. And in the next couple of days as we review, work and close tasks that figure should rise to about 40%. It is still too early, and in a holiday period too hard to guess, what percentage we will reach at the end of the initiative but I am hoping for a rather conservative 50% of the total number of tasks which is a huge figure when we take into account the days worked on the tasks thus far.

The average length of a task, and this is an estimate based on a mean statistical average, is 3 days in length of student time, the mentors will put in anything from a couple of hours to a half day on each task dependent on the complexity and amount of interaction.

To work out this statistical mean I took the list of task lengths:

  • 2 tasks at 4 hours duration
  • 3 tasks at 1 day duration
  • 204 tasks at 2 days duration
  • 131 tasks at 3 days duration
  • 29 tasks at 4 days duration
  • 11 tasks at 5 days duration
  • 1 task at 5 days 10 hours duration
  • 3 tasks at 6 days duration
  • 6 tasks at 7 days duration

Added this up to a total number of expected days: 1,90.78 days total and then divided this by number of tasks (390) which gives us a figure close to 2.8 days (2.79687179.) that I rounded to 3 days average.

This means from the list of Tasks closed (137 or 35.13) we have a total of 383 man days (383.171435 – 137 x 2.79687179) worked by the students on the initiative. (2) So we have in just 36 days done over a years work on Perl projects which is so fantastic that I can do little more than point at these figures and smile broadly.

The completion of one task is a bonus to the organisation, language and projects. the completion of close to 40% of a huge list of tasks in just five weeks is astonishing and the fact that this has brought more than a years worth of work to Perl projects and libraries is stunning. the students, mentors and organisers of this year’s Google Code-in have a lot to be proud about. I look forward to bringing you a final set of these figures in three weeks when we have the close of the event.

If you encounter any of the participants for this year online or offline make sure to add your congratulations for the job they have done so far.

Moar People Please

Student Bodies

We would dearly love to have more students sign up to the initiative so please do your utmost to spread the word around, students and mentors can sign up at any time during the whole of the initiative so it isn’t too late to join in.

If you can put up some flyers, or send them to a local school/colleges technical science/equivalent department there are templates available on the Perl Foundation website:

Full colour – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic.pdf

Reduced colour (prints in B&W) – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic-home-small-office-printer.pdf

TPF press releases – http://www.perlfoundation.org/press_releases (simply scroll to the bottom of the page)

Mentors

We would also like to make a plea to you all to consider being a mentor, you can take just one task and help a great deal, the typical task takes a couple of hours to review and work with the student, some tasks take more but there is a community of mentors willing to help you in the irc channel #gci on irc.perl.org.

All mentors current and future should add their name to the mentor list on the wiki so that we have a record of who you are for the future so we can all look back and bask in the glory :).

Finally…

If you cannot mentor, if you don’t know students, if you live on a desert island beach that is only visited by lost killer whales looking for an Asda to buy seal steaks at, you at least have an internet connection and you can help spread the word through the social and traditional media channels of our World Wide Webular Community, so please do at least that :).

Thanks in advance

-mdk

(1) However if a task has been closed because it has been unable to be completed, or for some reason along those lines it will be included in these figures.

(2) Please keep in mind that these are statistical averages and although reasonably accurate only a manual counting of exact task lengths will give an exact figure, these illustrations are purely to give an idea of the impact.

Perl Rocks Latin America

06 Dec 2011 at 21:00

mdk

Perl, Promotion

7 Comments

A Perl Team wins a web app. competition

There is often a description, a type, bandied at Perl that you cannot build an application in the language in a short period of time and so it isn’t suitable for the apparent ‘fast-paced’ and ‘flexible’ web development world. A group of Perl hackers in Brazil turned that notion around when they won the W3C(1) competition announced today.

W3C Competiton

The Desarorollando América Latina is a competition to build an application in a short period of time. The rules are:

  • All data used must be public and open;
  • The software must be open source;
  • You have 30 hours to construct the Application over two consecutive days starting on the 3rd December at 10:00 and finishing on the 4th December at 14:00 hrs;
  • There is a maximum 8 persons per team;
  • Live coverage of the event and teams was provided around the clock via an online stream;
  • You must be from Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru or Uruguay (afaics).

The prize is to present your application idea to a team of start-ups in Silicon Valley, USA, in the new year.

Forty-seven teams entered this year’s competition which means there were 400 hackers (approximately) working from all across Latin America, there was, however, only one team using Perl, the winning one. There is a full list of the teams (and their apps) here.

The Team

The Perl team that entered was lead by Shadowcat Systems(2) developer, and São Paulo PM group member, Eden Cardim. Their entry was to construct a site that linked Geographical location and crimes committed/reported in that region. You can visit their winning site here.

The polygons that make up the maps on their entry were obtained from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics and the felony data comes from the Security Bureau of the State of Rio Grande do Sul which is the only organisation that actually releases the data openly.

This page is a good place to start looking at how the data is used.

The team took the data from the Security Bureau and cross referenced it against the maps and that is how they then constructed the maps and data tables for the info-graphics. The data that they obtained had pinpoint latitude and longitude that they had hoped to incorporate but in the end time was against them as the data was in poor shape to manipulate.

The Tools

The Perl team decided to invest in using Catalyst and DBIx::Class as both of these projects are mature with well-supported toolsets and dependency chains and ample documentation. Eden is quoted as saying “in fact, we didn’t even spend a lot of time writing Perl, since it all [Perl, CPAN, Catalyst and Dbic] worked flawlessly most of the time was spent actually beating the data into shape”.

The whole community should be proud of the team and their success and it is a great reflection of how a mature language, the community ethos around Perl, CPAN and associated projects can result in a fast application development under time constraints and in a competition environment.

So in true Perl tradition, please be upstanding and magnaminous in your praise, exuberantly voluminous in your voice while copiously cheerful in the raising of your glasses.

“Hail Perl and the Perl Mongers of Brasil”.

-mdk

(1) The W3C were a major sponsor/infrastructure provider of the competition which is why I am using them as the shorthand term for the event as opposed to the less easy to type and pronounce Desarorollando América Latina.

(2) I just had to mention that Eden has been an essential member of the Shadowcat Team for many years and our faith in him is pretty much obvious when you know of his vast range of talents and deep level of skill in coding with his particular current focus of Perl.

Hack-at-it

06 Dec 2011 at 15:43

mdk

Hackathon, North West England Perl Mongers, Perl, Perl Mongers, Uncategorized

No Comments

North West England Hackday 3

Saturday 3rd December was the North West England annual hackday held at the Shadowcat offices in Lancaster once again (for those of you who didn’t know – or just guess – we have been the proud hosts of all three hackdays thus far).

This year the plan was to hack on two different projects and allow others to hack on whatever they wished. We were hampered this year by a massive set of clashes in schedule for various members, this caused us to move the hackday from the 19th November in the first instance and then because of limited numbers signed up as available on the day to limit our focus from a pair of projects to starting work on updating just Presenting Perl.

Presenting the Organiser

Our decision to choose an organiser per project for this year’s event seems to have borne fruit. The notion was that the general day organiser, which was Ian and I, would not have to also organise the whole of the project and tasks. We handed that to Castaway and it worked well enough on the day to insist upon it at future events.

Castaway instigated several decisions and led discussions that resulted in:

  • A decision to hold virtual hackdays each quarter to keep the development going;
  • A decision to use online tracking of tasks management, we chose trello.com;
  • A decision to update the wiki as much as we can as we go along to keep documentation;
  • A decision to use webcams and group (Google+) visibility which does make you feel like you are in the room;

We didn’t manage to do a huge number of tasks in the end though some of us (Jess) got a lot more done than everyone else (industrious beaver), but I think everyone who attended was satisfied that they got something done and they were able to interact and contribute, I would love for the other attendees to give me their thoughts. We noted down what each of us got done on the day, though this list was incomplete as many of the attendees got down to doing things not updating a page of what they had done.(1)

Social Aspect…

As always one of the strongest elements of the day was the social aspect. We were able to work together as a distributed team on a task but also were able to spend time in the company of fellow contributors. The virtual presence of theorbtwo and castaway was particularly good (great idea James) and I think it is something we will have to maintain on future events.

We did have a new member to the group who turned up at the hackday to join in and start socialising with fellow Perlers and that was great, Carl spent a good deal of his day making sure that the new member was made to feel part of the group and answering some questions and queries about Catalyst. The great aspect of a Mongers meet is that you can often introduce people to new things and to help them overcome stumbling blocks in their own code.

In all the day was successful for the social aspects alone, and the fact that we made good headway on the PP tasks and worked out a new schedule and way of collaborating for going forward made it a success as a technical event. I look forward to the next one and will no doubt report on it in here.

-mdk

(1) This didn’t stop me adding some jocularity…

Google Code-in – Fit the Second

04 Dec 2011 at 00:28

mdk

Google Code-in, Perl

No Comments

(Please note that the figures used in this article are from 18:00 UTC on Saturday 3rd December and they are pulled from a download of data of data from the Melange interface, the absolute accuracy is dependent on the people providing data (very good IME) but will, therefore, not reflect the exact situation at the time of your perusal).

The Story Thus Far…

The Google Code-in is an initiative aimed at 13-17 year old school/college students with the idea of getting them involved with open source. The majority of this can be found in the first article of this series: Google Code-in: Fit the First.

Understanding the Figures(1)

It is now approximately three weeks into the project (2 weeks on Monday since the students upped-pens however) and I thought I would give you a quick update of how we are doing so far before I issue my demands pleas for help and crave your indulgence and participation. It would have been nice to run a comparison between this year’s efforts and last years. But the TPF didn’t involve itself as strongly as a mentor organisation last year, we instead participated with the Parrot Foundation and therefore the majority of the Perl related tasks were under the Rakudo project or related to parrot. The project managers at the time were running a new initiative and didn’t have the time in that fledgling environment to gather accurate statistics and these are not available to us through the interface (that I am able to discover).

  • So our current number of tasks stands at an impressive 376 potential tasks for students;
  • There have been 69 tasks closed/completed which is 18% of the total;
  • 12 days Have passed and there are 44 days remaining in the initiative, 78% of the time remains;
  • We have 44 mentors listed in the organisation database;
  • We have 77 students who have taken or completed tasks;
  • There are 261 tasks left in the current group, these are those that are unopened or unclaimed which is 69% of the total;
  • There are 46 claimed tasks or in progress which is 13% of the total;
  • Therefore we have completed/near completed 31% of our tasks (w00t).(3)

Moar Tasks Please

The current group of tasks looks daunting but we still need more, this will give our students a greater choice and help us recruit more students to the initiative. We would particularly love to have tasks from Perl6 which was a tad under-represented in the initial round. We also would love some tasks from the popular modules, frameworks and APIs. Visit the EPO wiki to learn more about the type of tasks and to submit new tasks for the December 16th Deadline.

Moar People Please

Student Bodies

On that note we would dearly love to have more students sign up to the initiative so please do your utmost to spread the word around. If you can put up some flyers, or send them to a local school/colleges technical science/equivalent department there are templates available on the Perl Foundation website:

Full colour – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic.pdf

Reduced colour (prints in B&W) – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic-home-small-office-printer.pdf

TPF press releases – http://www.perlfoundation.org/press_releases (simply scroll to the bottom of the page)

Mentors

We would also like to make a plea to you all to consider being a mentor, you can take just one task and help a great deal, the typical task takes a couple of hours to review and work with the student, some tasks take more but there is a community of mentors willing to help you in the irc channel #gci on irc.perl.org.

All mentors current and future should add their name to the mentor list on the wiki so that we have a record of who you are for the future so we can all look back and bask in the glory :).(4)

Finally…

if you cannot mentor, if you don’t know students, if you live in a cave that is frequented by an elderly and flatulent wolf who never shares his half of the bills, you at least have an internet connection and you can help spread the word through the social and traditional media channels of our World Wide Webular Community, so please do at least that :).(5)

Thanks in advance

-mdk

(1) Please ignore my very simplistic figure representation, a better statistician, hell a statistician (!), would have done a far nicer, and potentially more accurate(2), job.

(2) So My Statistician joke, while I have you here.

Three statisticians are out shooting ducks.
Statistician One fires, but shoots too high,
Statistician Two fires, but shoots too low,
Statistician Three says, “hey look, I hit it”

(Your groans of pain are appreciated)

(3) If anyone wants to make a pretty chart (not a boring pie chart but something non-Florence and full of 3D snappiness and textual exposition, then feel free and I will add it here :) I could just make an info-chart they seem popular :)

(4) Sounds pompous but for the first time I have mentored two students, they were smart and got the work done with very little help needed from me and we have a great set of completed tasks. So I know how good it feels when you complete something with a student.

(5) Keep your eyes peeled, there will at least be a Fit the Third in this series.

EPO sponsors Perl QA

03 Dec 2011 at 15:03

mdk

Enlightened Perl Organisation, Uncategorized

No Comments

For the second Year running the Enlightened Perl Organisation is proud to be counted among the sponsors for the (Perl) Quality Assurance Hackathon. The membership have voted to sponsor the event with 1,000 Euros to help with the operating costs as seen appropriate by the organisers.

The QA Hackathon is a free of charge coding workshop for people involved in Quality Assurance, testing, packaging, CPAN, and other projects related to quality assurance. The workshop is not only aimed at Perl projects, however, many of the attendees will be planning to work on projects that have a direct benefit to the Perl language.

This year the Hackathon will once again be organised by the French Perl Mongueurs, who have taken up the baton ahead of the UK who will be running the event in 2013.

Make sure you visit the QA Website and show your support by speaking about this event and perhaps consider donating or sponsoring yourself.

You can follow me on twitter as @shadowcat_mdk, on Facebook or by typing 6 letters into your browser mdk.me.

-mdk

 

Google Code-in – Fit the First

22 Nov 2011 at 14:45

mdk

Google, Google Code-in, Ironman, Perl

No Comments

Yesterday, Monday 21st November, saw the official start at 08:00 UTC of the Google Code-in Student participation. What this meant was that students could sign up to the program and start taking tasks from that point. I thought I would take this opportunity to bring you all up to date on how the efforts are going and to supply you with further information.

Firstly due to a problem with Melange which is the software powering the initiative provided by Google we have been given an extra seven days to submit tasks. So if you still have tasks you would like to submit you can get them into the first round of tasks before Monday 28th November. We would particularly like to see tasks that focused on fixing bugs in a module or library, or perhaps writing or adding tests. We also seem to have very few Perl6 focused tasks so would appreciate any that addressed this. If you miss this date don’t worry as the next round is due on the 16th December 2011 where we can add more tasks. We currently have 335 tasks listed for our students to attempt, but the more choice we have the more students we can attract and many of the tasks can be completed in a few hours. We already saw success on the very first day of the event when a student completed a task and it was verified (before 08:00 UTC Tuesday which was within the PST that Google uses), two others were awaiting verification from mentors.

We would like to encourage all those people who have decided to sign up as a mentor, who think that they have the time to try mentoring (we will give help and each mentor has a back-up and support from the other mentors), or who have added their name to the list on the wiki but have not yet filled out the form, to go online at: http://www.google-melange.com/gci/profile/mentor/google/gci2011 as soon as possible and sign up. We have so far had twenty-eight people sign up as mentors and would dearly love to have more so that we can cover all the tasks and students . The role is a valued one and is enormously rewarding when you consider you are involved in perhaps the next generation of programmers who will help shape our world, and who knows we may encourage more people into the glorious world of Perl.

So far we have had twenty-five students sign up for the tasks that are on offer. Students will often complete more than one task and many of them will do a handful of tasks. the most successful applicants are invited to attend a special conference at Google’s headquarters in San Francisco and all students are rewarded for successfully taking part. If you know of anyone who would like to attend, or have the ability to pin up a flyer at a school, social club or other venue attended by student, particularly if you know a teacher or head of IT at a local school or young person’s college than we would be very grateful if you would do so. the flyers are available as pdf files online at:

Full colour – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic.pdf

Reduced colour (prints in B&W) – http://www.perlfoundation.org/attachment/press_releases/GCi-2011-basic-home-small-office-printer.pdf

TPF press releases – http://www.perlfoundation.org/press_releases (simply scroll to the bottom of the page)

Students and Mentors can sign up at any point during the initiative but the sooner they do so the better it will be.

Thanks for all your help thus far, Rafl, Paul and I will be sure to keep you all updated as we progress through this year’s initiative.

- mdk

MetaCPAN Logo Competition

17 Nov 2011 at 17:09

mdk

Ironman, Perl

2 Comments

The Enlightened Perl Organisation was approached recently by Florian Ragwitz (rafl) to sponsor a competition aimed at creating a logo for MetaCPAN. Rafl’s proposal (which can be viewed here), is to hold the competition so that the winner would make his artwork available in the first part to MetaCPAN to use while retaining moral copyright of authorship. The data released to MetaCPAN would subsequently be open sourced, the usage of it being the same licences as Perl.

The Enlightened Perl Organisation held a vote according to its member charter and all those who voted were in approval of the scheme and sponsorship. The Enlightened Perl Organisation will award the winner of the competition with an Amazon gift voucher to the value of $400.

Once the competition is announced I will make sure to advertise it on this page and others, please keep your eyes peeled for the notification, you can follow either myself (@shadowcat_mdk) or rafl (@perldition) on Twitter.

-mdk

 

NWE Hakathon Moves Date

17 Nov 2011 at 10:04

mdk

Events, Hackathon, Ironman, North West England Perl Mongers, Shadowcat

No Comments

Hey all.

For those of you planning to attend the NWE yearly Hackathon this weekend please note that we have had to have an emergency move of date to the 3rd December.

Both Ian and I are truly sorry for doing this at the very last minute but it was completely unavoidable. Hopefully this means we have a couple of more weeks to help persuade people of the need to come to this important event. Remember you can attend both in person and across the aether-nets.

If you attend in person it will be at the Shadowcat Systems offices in Lancaster where we will be happy to provide you with snacks, beer and pizza. This year we intend to add new features and improvements to both the Ironman and Presenting Perl projects. The hackday will run from 10:30 – 20:30 UTC (GMT +0). Please make sure you sign up at: https://nwe.eventwax.com/hackday-2011.

-mdk

 

London Perl Workshop 2011

14 Nov 2011 at 15:10

mdk

Events, Ironman, London Perl Workshop, Marketing, Promotion, Workshop

3 Comments

Reflection, part two

In my first post on Friday I reflected on the fact that this year’s London Perl Workshop was the fourth event that I had organised, in this post I want to talk about this year after the event and some elements around it.

If you build it…

In preparing for this year’s conference I built upon some of the lessons of previous years. The first element I conquered was to start the organisation, especially in regards to the venue and the sponsors, at an early stage. there is really no early date for this, if you start to organise the following year while the event is ongoing in the previous year you are doing a good job. The venue is a fixed element that is essential for any further promotion as it gives your time and location. This will help in gaining the sponsors as they will be able to target their needs and any surrounding advertisment to your event. So do it early.

Building on that thought, advertise, promote, push. You have to keep the event fresh in people’s minds and spoon them as much information as you can, though you also walk a very fine line between being interesting and boring, annoying and alienating your audience and any potentially new people. It is a very fine line, trying to give as much new information while still keeping any concurrent details fresh in people’s minds is a difficult balance.

I think, aside from one or two over-enthusiastic mail list postings, I managed to increase the promotion without becoming victim to this issue. I am aware however that I have to start the whole process again now for next year.

I’m going to have myself a real good time…

Over the past few years we have managed to increase the size of the audience at the London Perl Workshop, aside from last year whose many elements caused a major issue in number calculations that bucked the trend it has risen year on year. The number was between 140-175 persons who attended on the day, but the increased promotion and change of conference format to incorporate more beginner tracks and training seems to have paid off dividends this year. We had over 250+ persons attend on the day, some of them attending on either the morning or afternoon and some stayed the whole day and into the late evening.

 

People signing in at registration

People signing in at registration

This figure is a conservative estimate, we had 280+ signed up on the website and many people arrived who had not pre-registered.

Sign of the times

One issue that arose from this was that there was a large amount of over-subscribed talks, for the most part we were able to accommodate the extra numbers, but some people ended up disappointed as they were unable to attend the talks they had placed on their personal schedule.

Another issue was with signs. Although I had extra signs printed for the event the vast number of people and the five different rooms caused some confusion so that a few people went to the wrong room.

Signs on the wall

The confusing signs that we apparently proliferated confusion with

We have plans to make sure that doesn’t happen next year.

Time after time…

There are always people who volunteer their help for the London Perl Workshop. Some of these people return year after year and do so unfailingly. One such person is Dave Cross who returns each year to do a presentation, tutorial or workshop for the conference. Ian Norton also ran a workshop for new beginners to Perl and aimed at learning together, Ian is a regular volunteer and really took the challenge of bringing Perl to new people to heart and created a great workshop from It. The other workshops/training by Miyagawa and Gabor, although sponsored, were fantastic events and greatly appreciated that these busy and important people could give up their time. Lastly a huge thanks to Andrew Solomon for creating an introductory workshop to Dancer that was similarly well received.

 

Ian Norton hard at work training people

Ian Norton hard at work training people

But there is also Chris Jackson, Steve Sexton, Léon Brocard (did I manage to get the spelling remotely correct this time?), Avi Greenbury, Tom Doran, Martin Brooks, Leigh Keating (+Ben, +Bump), Billy Abbot, Sean Tohill, Mike Whitaker, Jess Robinson, Leo Lapworth, David Dorward and many others who helped in large ways and small, and as the saying goes they do it “time after time”.

I could talk for some time about the speakers, about the high quality of their presentations, about how some of them are insane and actually indulge in conference-driven development. But I know there are tweets and blogs being written about them and I encourage you to seek them out, the first to get the word our was by Dave Precious, http://www.preshweb.co.uk/2011/11/lpw2011-my-thoughts-overall/, who works for one of the Sponsors and turned up with (Jim, James, Jimmy and Jock (or Jim, James, Dave and Ross as they are also known)) to the event.

There are also our sponsors. Some of these return each year and are a constant mainstay, without whom this event would be so much less than it is. I can hardly contemplate them not being with us, they are amazing and this year I asked more from them and I received it with good will and good wishes. So to:

  • antibodyMX
  • Booking.com
  • Bytemark::Hosting
  • Dotcloud.com
  • Enlightened Perl Organisation
  • Exonetric
  • Magnum Solutions
  • Moonfruit
  • Net-A-Porter
  • O’Reilly
  • Shadowcat Systems Limited
  • SurVoip
  • University of Westminster
  • UK2.net

Thank you so very much for your support, thanks to those of you who sent sponsor items, who attended, who sent staff and who did presentations. A big thanks to O’Reilly for once again turning up with a great selection of books and fantastic deals for the day.

Please sir, can I have some more…

One of the great things about a workshop, and I find it is common to most open source or Creative Commons linked technical workshops, is the quality of the topics you find in the hallway tracks and social events around them. The London Perl Workshop now seems to have acquired a tradition of a social event involving sponsored amber nectars after the day, and we have also incorporated coffee and cakes, sponsored food and a wealth of other tiny elements of excellence in this to further enhance this social phenomena.

The numbers of people this year led to the unwanted (yet also excellent) position of the food and drink disappearing in record time and quantities, something we will have to consider for next year if we want to continue to offer this service or organise an equivalent appropriate element.

 

Outside the social venue for lunch

Outside the social venue for lunch

 

Yesterday’s forgotten the morning after…

So the conference is over for another year…well not really.

There is the Conference Survey to fill out. If you registered for the conference a link would have been sent to you to fill out so that we can get feedback and work out plans for next year. The survey also helps the speakers to know how to pitch their talks, or improve and adapt them and their performance for future years.

Then there is the processing of photographs, of which I have posted some on flickr: http://link.shadow.cat/tAIlJf and Facebook: http://link.shadow.cat/ugpGwE – and while you are there you might like to “share” or “like” the Facebook page for the event which will be updated with news throughout the year.

Lastly there is the videos, which must be ripped, cut, edited and processed and then uploaded to the internet for you who were not there to enjoy, or for you to watch again and relive and share a fond memory. They will be uploaded to http://www.presentingperl.org in due course.

So for your friendly organiser and his fellow volunteers the job is not yet over…

Also, as I said at the start of this piece we now start the whole process off again, part of that is the winding down of this year’s conference and the reporting on its events and impact and making sure, as I hope I have, to thank all those involved in the event. For the rest, let me announce that the London Perl Workshop 2012…will be next year :).

–mdk

 

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