Memoirs of a Roadie

Do You Remember the First Time?

Posted on 4th October 2011

YAPC::Europe 2011 Survey Results

During August this year, in Riga, Latvia, YAPC::Europe brought together 285 people to learn, discover and discuss Perl. As previous attendees know the YAPC conferences are a perfect opportunity to introduce yourself to the Perl community. YAPCs are now held all around the world and each is very different another. Each has their own charactistics, and they all get better and better thanks to the feedback from attendees old and new, which is why the YAPC Conference Surveys are well placed to concentrate that feedback for future organisers.

For YAPC::Europe 2011, the survey results are now online.

Although the responses where down from previous YAPC::Europe events, we still had over 50%, so thank you to everyone who took the time to respond. Interestingly of those who took the survey, none recorded themselves as coming from Latvia. I suspect this is in part due to the language barrier. As the surveys are in English, those that don't feel quite comfortable with the language might feel less inclined to feedback their thoughts and experiences. I'd like to be able to have the surveys available in different languages, but accumulating some of the responses, particularly the free text ones, may prove difficult. However, this is a goal for the future.

Unsurprisingly these days, we saw a large number of people attending who are regulars either to the YAPCs and Workshops or to the Perl community generally. At the conference itself we did ask how many attendees were at their first YAPC, and it was quite significant. However, we are still seeing roughly the same numbers, so we are not necessarily able to keep those new attendees coming back as regular attendees. In this survey however, no-one stated that they wouldn't attend another event in the future, so hopefully next year we should start seeing more familiar faces.

This year I plan to get the free text feedback sections online, and may well provide these for previous years too. I normally only provide these to the organisers (both current and succeding), but I think everyone could benefit from the thoughts and ideas, whether a YAPC organiser or an organiser of any other technical event.

Many thanks to all those who took the time to respond, both to the Conference Survey and all the Talk Evaluations. Your time is very much appreciated.

What's the Frequency, Kenneth?

Posted on 8th September 2011

YAPC::NA 2011 Survey Results

During June this year, in Asheville, North Carolina, YAPC::NA assembled 251 people together to learn and discuss Perl, Perl projects and meet Perl people. The YAPC conferences are a perfect opportunity to tell the Perl community of your latest project, or to talk to other Perl developers face to face. YAPCs have now been running for 12 years, and each gets more focused and exposure than the last. In part in this thanks to all the previous organisers who have gone before, offering help and advice where they can. However, the YAPC Conference Surveys also help to provide value feedback to future organisers.

For YAPC::NA 2011, the survey results are now online.

While only 34% of all attendees responded, the feedback has still proved very helpful and provided me with some additional questions for the future. I was recently asked how I thought the YAPCs had changed, and one of the changes I noted, as is hinted at in the feedback, is that many of the talks now focus more on Perl frameworks and applications, rather than specific modules or techniques. In a way it highlights how Perl has grown up. Perl is still a language and tool to get jobs done, but now there are more stable and constructive ways of getting those jobs done.

Many thanks to all those who took the time to respond, both to the Conference Survey and all the Talk Evaluations. Apologies for the delay in getting the results online, but events with CPAN Testers have taken most of my free time over the last 2 weeks :(

Rearviewmirror

Posted on 19th August 2011

Earlier this week I attended YAPC::Europe 2011. Many thanks to Andrew, Alex and all the others involved with bringing the conference to life, it was well worth all the effort.

During the conference I gave two talks. The first was my main talk, Smoking The Onion - Tales of CPAN Testers, which looked at how authors can use the CPAN Testers websites to improve their distributions, as well some further hints and tips for common mistakes spotted by testers over the years. It also looked at how some of the sites can be used by users to see whether a particular distribution might be suitable for their purposes or not. The talk seemed to go down well, and it seems a few were disappointed to have missed it, after discovering it wasn't my usual update of what has been happening with CPAN Testers. Thankfully, I did video the talk, and I think the organisers also have a copy, so expect to see it on YAPC TV and Presenting Perl at some point in the future.

Photo by Jon Allen

My second talk, Perl Jam - How To Organise A Conference (and live to tell the tale), was a lightning talk to help promote my book and the YAPC Conference Surveys. The book is currently a work in progress, and I'd like to get more feedback from anyone who has been an organiser of a YAPC, Workshop or Hackathon, as well as any photos that would help to highlight particular sections of the book. If you think you could help, please take a look at the GitHub repository and send a pull request with any updates you think appropriate.

Congratulations to Frankfurt.pm for winning the chance to host YAPC::Europe 2012. See you next year.

Points of Authority

Posted on 27th May 2011

Back in February I did a presentation for the Birmingham Perl Mongers, regarding a chunk of code I had been using to test websites. The code was originally based on simple XHTML validation, using the DTD headers found on each page. I then expanded the code to include pattern matching so I could verify key phrases existed in the pages being tested. After the presentation I received several hints and suggestions, which I've now implemented and have set up a GitHub repository.

Since the talk, I have now started to add some WAI compliance testing. I got frustrated with finding online sites that claimed to be able to validate full websites, but either didn't or charged for the service. There are some downloadable applications, but most require you to have Microsoft Windows installed or again charge for the service. As I already had the bulk of the DTD validation code, it seemed a reasonable step to add the WAI compliance code. There is a considerable way to go before I get all the compliance tests that can be automated written into the distribution, but some of the more immediate tests are now there.

As mentioned in my presentation to Birmingham.pm, I still have not decided on a name. Part of the problem being that the front-end wrapper, Test::XHTML, is written using Test::Builder so you can use it within a standard Perl test suite, while the underlying package, Test::XHTML::Valid uses a rather different approach and does provides a wider API than just validating single pages against a DTD specification. Originally, I had considered these two packages should be two separate releases, but now that I've added the WAI test package, I plan to expose more of the functionality of Test::XHTML::Valid within Test::XHTML. If you have namespace suggestions, please let me know, as I'm not sure Test-XHTML is necessarily suitable.

Ultimately I'm hoping this distribution can provide a more complete validation utility for web developers, which will be free to use and will work cross-platform. For those familiar with the Perl test suite structure, they can use it as such, but as it already has a basic stand-alone script to perform the DTD validation checks, it should be usable from the command-line too.

If this sounds interesting to you, please feel free to fork the GitHub repo and try it out. If you have suggestions for fixes and more tests, you are very welcome to send me pull requests. I'd be most interested in anyone who has the time to add more WAI compliance tests and can provide a better reporting structure, particularly when testing complete websites.

Behind The Lines

Posted on 25th May 2011

Back last year I got a curious email from a fellow London.pm'er asking why I was releasing so many WWW-Scraper-ISBN distributions. The reason was quite simple, to make my life easier! Well okay, that's why I wrote the distributions, but I figured others might find them useful too.

In the UK the book trade is a bit odd, and I dare say the rest of the world suffers from this too. The publishers don't like to give too much information away about their books, and the central body for allocating ISBNs, Nielsen, don't always have all the necessary metadata available. The book trade uses MARC Records to transfer this metadata around, and unfortunately, while there is provision to include much of the metadata, it often isn't included. The obvious things such as the Author, Title and the ISBN itself are usually there, but some of the data relating to the physical attributes (pages, height, width and weight) rarely are.

Originally I wrote the Amazon, Pearson Education, O'Reilly Media and Yahoo! Books distributions to use within Labyrinth, particularly for the Birmingham Perl Mongers website, and our Book Reviews. The plugin mechanism allowed me, when I received a review, to enter the ISBN and prepopulate the metadata fields and links before adding the review itself. The four distributions saved a lot of time, but the initial releases were quite basic.

Jumping forward several years, now needing this extra metadata, I first expanded the original four distributions. However, not all of these online bookstores provided this extra metadata. Picking a variety of books I searched to see what metadata I could retrieve, and came across several sites around the world that included this information to varying degrees. Much of the basic information regarding an ISBN shouldn't change from country to country, so metadata retrieved from Australia or New Zealand is as valid as that from America or the UK. There are aspects that can differ, such as the cover illustration, but the majority of metadata returned should be applicable regardless of location.

There was some interesting discrepancies with the different units of weights and measures used across the sites too. While some stuck to a set of fixed units, others changed depending how big the values were, particularly for grammes and kilogrammes. I settled on grammes for weight and millimetres for height and width, seeing as metric was the most commonly used on the various sites.

It did cross my mind whether to include the prices in the metadata returned, but as prices often fluctuate frequently and are very location dependent, you are probably better to write this side of things yourself for your specific purpose, such as a comparision website. I also left out depth, as only a few sites regularly provided a value for it. I can always save it for a future release anyway.

Hopefully those that work in the book trade, who have been wishing that MARC Records were populated a little more fully than they are currently, can make use of these distributions to help fill in the gaps.