Perl Oasis 2010 Thankyou

Perl Oasis 2010 Thank You

So Perl Oasis 2010 is now done, I’m currently sitting in the Hackathon room watching people quietly mingle and work on their projects. All told we had 33 people from 15 PMs across 4 countries. This is a larger attendance than last year, but still small enough I felt I got to sit and talk with people and really hang out.

To forestall questions, yes video was shot of all of the sessions. I’m unsure of how long the editing process will take, but expect an announcement when the video will be ready. The quality of all of the talks was excellent and overall The general comments I got were very favorable, things like “excellent workshop”, “well organized”. So I’m pleased with the results.

On to the Thank You notes.

I want to thank the people who came, these conferences simply wouldn’t work if nobody wanted to attend. I also want to thank the speakers¹, nobody would want to attend if we didn’t have such an excellent selection of talks. They were the show.

I want to thank Marty and Karen Pauly who traveled the furthest to be there. They are 2/3rds of the reason why Shibuya.pm was tied for the largest attending PM group. Karen also let Jamie and I talk her ear off with our organizing nattering and worries about the TPF.

I want to thank Mark Keating (mdk) for his excellent keynote on “The awful things we all must do and the most disgusting word you’ll hear”. He encourages all of us to step out and talk about Perl not in divisive terms (Perl5 vs. Perl6; Perl vs. Python, Ruby, PHP; Perl5 Version 10 vs. Perl 5.10) but rather to use inclusive terms (Rakudo and Moose and possibly Perl “Vincent”). Mark also presented me with our new mascot for Perl Oasis, Aurelia the Camel.

I want to thank DataRocket Data Services, who provided our A/V equipment. They are an excellent bunch of guys who do insane things with MySQL and very large data sets.

I want to specifically thank Cory Watson (gphat) and Magazines.com for stepping up and sponsoring the entire event. Without them we would be sitting in a parking lot somewhere, probably in the rain.

Finally I would like to thank my wife, Jamie, who the attendees all know worked her ass off organizing. I am an incredibly disorganized person and without her nothing would ever have gotten done.

We have already started talking with the venue about next year’s conference which will be the 15th of January, 2011. I hope to see you then!

Written on January 17th, 2010 by Chris Prather