YAPC::Asia 2012

Three years ago I paid a visit to Japan to attend YAPC::Asia. It was also my first time in Japan, and so in addition to a very enjoyable and well attended Perl conference, I got to enjoy the incredible Japanese cities, the beautiful nature, great food (and this is coming from somebody who can’t eat fish and seafood – yes, there are still plenty of nice things to eat) and some of the most polite and pleasant people I’ve come across anywhere. I’m still a bit mystified what made me leave coming back again a whole three years – but it goes without saying that I’m very glad I did. Japan is as awesome as I remembered. :-)

Naturally, Perl 6 has come a long way since I was last here. Last time, I talked about Perl 6 at the level of interesting snippets of code that you could run that solved small problems. These days, with the language having a growing ecosystem of modules and compilers capable of running them, it felt natural to focus on that. Thus, my talk was Exploring Perl 6 Through Its Modules. The code in it is really nothing new to those who have followed Perl 6 very closely; it just shows off various modules along with some annotations and explanations of how they put Perl 6 to good use. Many people don’t follow along so closely, however, so I think for most people attending the talk had quite a bit of new and interesting stuff.

Of all the Perl events I’ve been to, YAPC::Asia is by a long way the biggest. This year, once you counted speakers in, there was over 800 people there! That’s incredible for a community-organized conference, and the organizers did a great job of making it happen. Also impressive is that they got the videos of the talks up really soon afterwards – so you can even watch my talk! I suggest having the PDF of the slides too for easier following.

Anyway, I’ll now get on with enjoying the Japanese countryside for a few days before returning to Sweden and resuming life as normal. Maybe I’ll even be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Fuji, :-)