[Israel.pm] YAPC::Tokyo::2010 report

[Shmuel Fomberg]

Hi All.

A bit longer report from the YAPC:

It started on Thursday evening, with social gathering - that actually 
meant lectures on social networks websites and programming against / for 
them. And there were beers outside.
I have brought my wife and son to this gathering, because I though that 
it will be like YAPC::EU's social gathering. I was wrong.

Anyway, the lectures were in Japanese, and I could not see them anyway 
because my son demanded attention.

Another difference between the YAPC EU and that one is that in Pisa 
groups of programmers setteled in corners and started spontaneous 
hackingtons. there was a feeling in the air of 'start coding, now'.
In Tokyo it had more company-like feeling. At the maximum someone sat 
alone and worked on something. no more then that.

Of course, everyone twitter / bloged in the event. later I found a 
complete translation of my slides in Japanese on the web, apparently 
made on the fly.

Almost all the people of the conference were Japanese. there were a few 
foreigns who living in Japan, and just two people from outside - Larry 
Well and another one. It was no mode YAPC::Asia as the conference that 
Gabor did in Israel is YAPC::MiddleEast. but whatever.

The day of the conference itself, started with an introduction of the 
conference, (we have 500 people! YaY! whatever.) and the a presentation 
of Larry Well about languages and of course he had to show a few lines 
in Perl 6. (he took some examples from the rosetta stone, and show the 
difference between languages)

After that the different presentations started. Btw, it seen that the 
fashion today is presentation of white text over black background.
Most of the presentations were of course in Japanese, and I struggled to 
understand what they are talking about. But when I did, it was quite 
interesting.

And then the time for my presentation come. I got the small room, (there 
was the huge auditorium, the very big room, and the small room that can 
barely fit a hundred people, I think) luckily.
There was a break before my presentation, so I had time to connect my 
laptop, calm myself, be ready for it. and then thirty seconds before the 
start, Larry Well entered. Oh shit.

Actually in the presentation itself we wasn't seen so interested, and 
mostly played with his laptop. he was probably there just because it was 
in English, and was already tired of incomprehensible presentations, but 
still.

Beside him was Dan Kogai (the guy that do Perl's Unicode), and one 
weired guy who was dressed as Ninja and collected signatures from CPAN 
Authors. Over-all I think there were about fifty people.

Of course I was stressed and finished in about half an hour. (I had 
forty minutes)

After the presentation I went to another one (about writing parsers in 
Perl) and then went home, as Shabbat was drawing near.

Well, that's it.
See you around,
Shmuel.