Memoirs of a Roadie

All Over The World

Posted on 19th May 2010

Last year I went to 3 conferences, YAPC::NA, YAPC::Europe and LUGRadio Live. All very different in their own way, although all Open Source. Due to other projects, work and fanmily commitments, it has take quite a bit of time to review all the photos. After several months, I finally found some time to whittle them down to the selection I have uploaded here.

The first conference, YAPC::NA, took place in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. The team have been holding the Pittsburgh Perl Workshops for several years now, and by all accounts they had been very well received. With the YAPC set of conferences having started in Pittsburgh, at the Carnegie Mellon University where this conference also took place, the organisers were quite proud to promote a sort of home coming for the event. It was a good conference, though my first talk was somewhat problematic as we couldn't get a laptop to work with the projector. Thankfully my second talk went without a hitch. My thanks to confound for introducing me to 'xrandr', which solved all the problems I had getting Ubuntu talking to the projectors.

I also took the chance to visit the city of Pittsburgh and take a look around, with Abigail and myself taking an amphibious vehicle tour. The city has a lot of interesting places to see, and I'm glad I got to see the Heinz Building, the Stanley Theatre (where Bob Marley played his last ever gig), the venicular railways, and the site of the Three River Stadium (Yes, the car park! I'd seen a documentary about the building of Heinz Field and the demolishing of the Three River Stadium, so was even more intrigued to have a guided tour of the new stadium). If you're ever near the city, I recommend a visit, especially to see the flood levels of 1936 (the waters peaked at a rise of 46 feet above normal!).

The second conference, YAPC::Europe, was in Lisbon, Portugal. The conference itself was packed full of talks, though I think my lightning talk, which I'd been refining over the previous few months, generated the biggest reaction. Not surprising really, as it reminded people just how productive the Perl community was, particularly regarding CPAN.

I had originally thought about hiring a car and travelling along the Vasco da Gama Bridge (at 10.7 miles long, the longest road bridge in Europe), and do the circuit via the monument on the other side of the Tejo river, and back to Lisbon via the 25 de Abril Bridge (Lisbon's other bridge). I didn't in the end, but maybe I can save that for another time. Instead fellow Birmingham.pm'er Brian McCauley and myself walked around the city and took in some of the sights. When we got to the castle we managed to bump into a few other attendees (Paul Johnson, Aaron Crane and R Geffory Avery), who also had taken the advantage to do some sightseeing.

The last conference I attended was LUGRadio Live. For a number of reasons I didn't put forward a talk this year, but suggested JJ should give a talk instead. With the radio show no longer running, the conference had much more of a grassroots feel to it again. There ware some good talks, a couple of famous names, but mostly it felt like it was one big Linux User Group meeting, which to a degree it was, just a bit more global than your regular user group meeting ;) The conference was dubbed 'Back To Basic', but that really only applied to the extravagance. The quality of the conference was first rate. Being in Wolvehampton, just round the corner for me, I didn't take the opportunity to do any sightseeing, not that Wolverhampton is exactly the kind of place to do any sightseeing. As it happens I had taken Dan to the event, who loved it, especially building the lego models with all the other geeks. The following day was OggCamp, and although I would have liked to have attended, I had other commitments so had to pass. I think having the two events side by side though was a great idea, as it gives both events to feed off each other.

This year I'm currently only planning one conference, YAPC::Europe in Pisa, Italy. All being well I may get to see the tower, but as I'll be flying in and out just for the conference, I don't expect to see much more. I'm still undecided whether to submit a talk, as I'm trying to think of a suitable subject. I don't like repeating myself, but my two biggest profile Perl projects I've now covered for a couple of years (CPAN Testers and YAPC Surveys), so we'll see.

More photos to come, as I find time to get through the plethora of photos I've taken over the last year or so.

Long Time Gone

Posted on 4th May 2010

It has been quite a few months since I last posted here. Quite a few events and projects have happened and held my attention since I last wrote in my blog. And I still have a backlog of photos and videos from last year to get through too!

I did wonder whether anyone might think that after talking about Why The Lucky Stiff in one of my last posts, that I had done the same. Well for those who follow my CPAN Testers work, will know that CPAN Testers 2.0 has been a rather major project that finally got properly underway in December 2009. It's nearing completion, and I'll cover some of the highlights in a future post. Although it's been my most consuming project over the last 6 months or so, it hasn't been my only one. As mentioned in another of my last posts, I'm writing a book about how to host a YAPC. Due to other projects taking a higher priority, this has taken somewhat of a backseat for the time being, but I do plan on getting a second draft together within the next few months. I have looked into self-publishing the book and I'm now planning to have it formerly submitted with an ISBN (the internation book numbers) and supplied via print-on-demand print runs.

Another project that has been ongoing alongside my CPAN Testers work, has been my website management system, Labyrinth. This has been the website application I have been developing since 2002, and although several other Perl web frameworks have now been developed since, to lesser and greater degrees, Labyrinth has had the disadvantage of only having 1 core developer for the past 8 years. It's not an application that will revolutionise web development and deployment, but it has very successfully worked for a number of websites I have developed over the years. After having been relatively stable for the past year or two, I'm now cleaning up the code so I can properly release it as open source. This is mostly so that anyone wishing to contribute to CPAN Testers, or the YAPC Surveys, will then have all the code available to them. If anyone wants to use it and help develop it further, that would be a welcome bonus, but realistically other web frameworks have gained so much mindshare that I'm not expecting Labyrinth to make much of a dent any more. Not that that is a problem, as Labyrinth has made deploying websites so much easier for me, that I'll just be glad to let people help on CPAN Testers and the YAPC Surveys.

Speaking of the YAPC Surveys, YAPC::NA 2010 and YAPC::Europe 2010 are fast approaching. These will be next projects to get up and running. Thankfully the code base just needs a few upgrades to the latest version of Labyrinth, and some work on skinning the CSS to match the respective YAPC sites. All being well this should only take a few days. Then I'll be looking to release this version of the code base for anyone wishing to run similar surveys for themselves. I've already had one interested party contact me regarding a conference in October, so hopefully the code will be suitable, and only the questions need adapting. We shall see.

My other major project this year, also began back in December 2009. As some readers are well aware, I am an ex-roadie. From 1989-1994 I was a drum tech, lighting engineer and driver for Ark, one of the best Black Country bands ever. Not that I'm biased or anything ;) Last year the band got together for some rehearsals and planned a few reunion gigs. With interest gaining, an album was also planned. So this year, the band began recording and booking gigs. As a consequence the Ark Appreciation Pages desperately needed a makeover. I'll write more about what happened next in another post. Ark are back, and Mikey and I are delighted to be able to be involved with the band once again.

That's just a few of the projects that have taken up my time over the last 6-8 months. There are several others that I hope to post about, with family, time and work permitting. Expect to hear a little more from me than you have so far this year.

Time And A Word

Posted on 21st September 2009

A little while ago I mentioned that I was writing a book regarding how to organise a conference. Specifically looking at the YAPCs which I'm involved with, it covers all aspects of the organisation, from preparing a bid to what happens after the event. I effectively started writing the book 3 years ago, when I didn't feel that the rewrite of a simple plain text howto, covered any of the important points in any depth. In the last 3 years several aspects of organisaing a YAPC have changed, and they likely will in the next 3 years and more too. So now is perhaps a good time to get the current thoughts out.

It has actually surprised me that there isn't already a book available about organising an Open Source conference. There are several simple howtos published by some organisers of other Open Source conferences, some much larger than a YAPC, but nothing of the scale I was hoping for. In fact I haven't even found any book regarding organising any conference, even a non-technical one. It's possible there is one out there, but may be it has a very niche market. As such, I am hoping that in the longer term the book may evolve into advice not just for YAPCs, but a whole variety of conferences. Time will tell.

The first draft of the book was completed at the weekend, and has now been sent out to the reviewers. It'll probably be a little while still before the book is actually released, but at least I've got to a stage where I'm happy for others to start pulling it apart and rebuilding it. My aim is to release the book under a Creative Commons licence and it will be available as a free download. The text source will also be available, so that anyone wanting to can send me patches, suggestions, thoughts and general feedback.

While I'm waiting for the feedback from the reviewers, I'm now starting to look at photos taken at YAPCs that can be used in the book. There are already a few photos I've identified and a couple of photographers I've contacted already, but I'm still looking for more. It's difficult to say what I'm looking for too, as the actual conference itself is really just a small part of the whole project plan. In many cases it's just a week out of a year of preparation. What do you photograph to indicate planning? If you've taken photos of the behind the scenes activity while you prepped for a YAPC or workshop, I'd love to hear from you. I can't guarantee I'll use the photos, but you'll get full credit if I do.

So now on to the next part of my obligations to YAPCs for this year, The YAPC Conference Surveys. The surveys for this year's YAPC::Europe in Lisbon closed on Friday, so I now need to start working through the data and putting it into a format for presentation, as well as compiling all the speaker evaluation mails. There have been several tweaks to the system following YAPC::NA, so I'm hoping the YAPC::Europe results won't take so long to publish. I'm thinking that I might take a break in October, but I'm sure there'll be something to keep me occupied.

Turn The Page

Posted on 10th July 2009

I'm currently preparing myself for YAPC::Europe 2009. My talks are pretty much done, but I still need to fine tune some of the slides, particularly my big talk needs some additional work on its structure, so I don't labour the points. Also for the first time ever, I'm planning to submit a YAPC Lightning Talk. After talking with Mark Keating in Pittsburgh, he asked me to submit a lightning talk to the next NorthWestEngland Perl Mongers' technical meeting. As such I cut down my The Statistics of CPAN talk and gave it a go. The talk was supposed to be 5 minutes. However, 8 minutes later I finished! I guess I still need to cut a few more slides :) Thankfully Mark videoed the night, so I'm hoping I can critique my own performance, and fine tune what I say and the slides I use. Then I can really relax :)

Well not entirely. I've attended every YAPC::Europe conference and I'm now part of the YEF Venue Committee. While I have enjoyed attending YAPC::NA since 2005 in Toronto, I still feel an outsider. In some respects that's good, as it gives me a different perspective. One thing that has struck me over the years is that with every YAPC::NA organising team, there has been usually just one prominent member who is involved with the larger Perl community. In Europe there seems to be at least two (if not more) from each team who are known outside of their local user group. There are many other differences, but it's all helping me to add content for the book I'm writing.

After I helped to organise YAPC::Europe 2006 in Birmingham, I looked at rewriting the YAPC documentation that was available at the time. The previous version had been very US centric and many aspects were no longer applicable to any conference. More importantly, there were many more aspects to organising a conference that were missing. My initial rewrite is still online and hasn't been updated since, which is a shame, as I always hoped that the document would be a living document, with organisers from each year and around the world, helping to add their experiences to the document for future organisers.

As further updates haven't happened, I started to plan a rewrite the document again. Except it quickly became clear that this wasn't going to be a short update. Having witnessed the differences in more recent years between the NA and Europe YAPCs, there were many additions I wanted to make. From compiling and presenting bids, to the actual conference organising and communicating with sponsors, (potential) attendees and the wider IT community. As such, it quickly looked like I was better working on writing a book. I'm hoping that the result will be applicable to anyone organising an open source event, big or small, and will help to improve the conference experience for organisers and attendees alike.

But there was another aspect to writing it as a book that I wanted to help with, and that's promotion. Particularly with YAPCs, promotion to the community has usually been very good. There have been some hiccups along the way, but mostly it works out for the good. But the promotion to the general Open Source communities or the IT media is usually very lacking. Occasionally I come across people who have used Perl, but have no idea that YAPCs would be a good experience for them to learn more. By presenting a guide to organising a YAPC in book form, I'm hoping that it will help to promote how professional the YAPC conferences have become, and maybe inspire more sponsors to get involved too :)

This year, at YAPC::NA in Pittsburgh and I'll be doing likewise in Lisbon too, I've been taking notes. The differences between my casual involvement with YAPC::NA and more involved communications with YAPC::Europe are helping to shape some of my additions for the book. I'd like to get the book finished some time this year, so that I can get feedback from this year's organisers, and possibly other YAPC and workshop organisers from around the world. As yet I still don't have a title for the book, or cover or anything in the way of anything to promote it yet. I do plan to release it Open Source, probably under the Artistic License 2.0. I'm not planning on getting a publisher involved, but rather just release a PDF version. After all the source was originally available to all, and I want everyone organising a big technical event to have the opportunity to benefit from the contents.

If you have any thoughts about the book or what should go into it, feel free to collar me in Lisbon at the beginning of next month. I then plan to post more details about the book sometime in August.

Senses Working Overtime

Posted on 9th July 2009

I haven't written here for a while. and I haven't written that much in my other blogs either. I should have, as I keep having ideas for posts that I figure I should get around to writing up, For various reasons my time has been taken up with other things. I've been very busy with some of my Perl projects, specifically CPAN testers and YAPC Conference Surveys, and relating to the latter, I've recently attended YAPC::NA 2009, have been a judge for the Send-A-Newbie programme and am currently judging the bids, along with the rest of the YEF Venue Committee, for YAPC::Europe 2010 from Keiv.pm and Pisa.pm. On top of that I've also been trying to spend more time with my family.

For the past year or so I've been working 15-20 a week on extra curricular Perl projects. Although I've enjoyed doing the work and I'm really proud of what I've managed to achieve, I do need to take time out for my family. I'm very grateful for the support Nicole has given me, and the fact that Dan and Ethne don't seem to mind me getting up before them at the weekend and waiting to have their breakfast, while I just do this next fix :) But they deserve some of my time now. That's not to say I'm disappearing or anything, just that the balance is slightly shifting in their favour.

Since leaving MessageLabs, I now have a job that is a bus ride away in the centre of Birmingham, which now gives me the freedom to work on the bus for at least an hour a day. It's actually quite amazing how much I can get done, when I have to focus on getting something done with only 30 minites between stops. I've missed travelling to work on the bus, as driving up and down the M5 every work day for the past 6 years has felt more and more of a drain. I used to read a lot, but that all stopped once I started driving to work. I'm now planning to start working through my unread bookshelf again :)

The new job is a bit different, as although they are not a web shop, my role is very much focused on web development. As a consequence I'm really enjoying it. They have a series of sites that have been developed over the years, without any real thought to standards and best practices. As a consequence, they now have me to help clean up their code and processes. I hasten to add that I'm not some kind of saviour, as the guys have been working to improve what they have for some time, but I think they do see me as a bit of welcome relief. It's also been nice to be able to bring a lot of the knowledge I've drawn on for the past 10 years or so, and be able to give their sites a fresh lease of life.

In future posts expect a quick run down of my experiences in Pittsburgh for YAPC|10, some thoughts about YAPC::Europe 2009 in Lisbon and several photos from the various gigs I've been to over the past year. Yes I still have lots of photos to sort though. Soon, I promise :)