Perl@FOSDEM and some photographic impressions February 8, 2011
Posted by claudio in Uncategorized.Tags: belgium, fosdem, fosdem 2011, foss, Free Software, Modern Perl, Padre, Perl, perl::staff
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All right. FOSDEM was –as always– great. 4 to 5000 Free and Open Source people on the same event has to rock. While I attended many talks about different technologies (Devops aka “System Engineering meets development”, Monitoring, Go Programming language, …), I focussed mainly on the Perl activities (pun intended).
Following Gabor’s initiative (this guy runs on Duracell batteries), last year (2010) we set up the first FOSDEM Perl booth: one table, some volunteers, many visitors and great reactions. This year (2011) everything was even better. We had a big booth at the main hall, attributes (a giant Camel (!) and probably the biggest Perl book collection in the world (!)), books to sell, a packed developer’s room on Sunday, a Perl dinner and many volunteers. There were at any time several people at the booth and sometimes even too many 
. With so many volunteers it was possible to attend whatever session you wanted and also participate on the Perl developers’ room.
Here follow some pictures I took with some comments:
David Leadbeater’s Tracing Perl with DTrace/SystemTap
Liz and Wendy were to crazy nice enough to bring their giant camel and the biggest Perl book collection in the world. Both attributed really attracted visitors.
We had several books to sell… but not enough. We were sold out of chromatic’s Modern Perl halfway the first day (20 books!) and dams’s Perl Moderne (not the same book) was almost sold out as well!
Wendy and dams (from Dancer and “Perl Moderne” fame).
Although we didn’t have Automating System Administration with Perl at the booth, several people passed and showed us proudly their copy bought at the O’Reilly stand.
The main booth hall.
Those guys had something to celebrate: a new Debian stable was born.
Our perl-friendly neighbours…
We had several self-confessed Perl people: everyone like camels
No pun intended (the text reads “Whinging Bastard”,
DevOps? – More than Marketing by James Turnbull) .
Spike Morelli’s I’m Going M.A.D..
We had 13 people attending the Perl dinner! From left to right: Zeno, Bart, Gabor, Liz, Wendy, Dirk and Balint (the rest arrived later).
Mark Overmeers’s Perl data structures.
David Leadbeater’s Tracing Perl with DTrace/SystemTap: very interesting for a Solaris guy like me.
Introduction to writing readable and maintainable Perl by Alex Balhatchet.
Padre hackers Zeno and Gabor (Padre, the Perl IDE).
Paulo Castro (Packaging Perl and it’s deps…) took us to the Dark Side…
The image integration facilities of WordPress.com are pretty poor. If it wasn’t for some command line Perl foo, I would have given up posting this message. There is no way I would have gone through if I had to click 10 times for each picture…
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by perl ism and AnyEvent::PerlIsm, Daisuke Maki. Daisuke Maki said: FOSDEMいいね。 YAPCもこれくらい色んな人がいてもいいような気がする。 http://bit.ly/hdAsrF [...]
We sold all 10 of the Perl Moderne books as well! And over 15 O’Reilly Perl books (including Mastering Regular Expressions, Regular Expressions Cookbook, Perl Cookbook, Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Perl Pocket Reference).
We had over a 1,000 TUITS with us (you know, when somebody didn’t get around to it, you give him/her a round tuit, and that should do the trick) and we have none left.
We had 450 buttons “Programming Republic of Perl” with the Dutch genetically mutated camel (it is black and white, it eats grass, the hump is here underneath and it gives milk) and we have none left. We gave away hundreds upon hundreds of brochures, leaflets, beer coasters, Perl business cards (“We suck at marketing”).
We had a large pile of French language “Linux Dossier” magazines with the 2004 Perl special. All gone. Same for the free issues #3 and #4 of 2010 of the German Perl magazine $foo.
Hundreds of people petted our camel (her name is Meeltje). At least a hundred people took pictures of it. Some people even kissed it. Or put their stuffed pet toys on top of it and proudly stood in front of it, their photograph being taken.
The author of “Perl and Apache – Your visual blueprint” (Adam McDaniel) visited our booth, and showed us his book, and he was quite certain we didn’t have a copy. Well, we did, and he proudly signed it for me (thanks Adam!).
Afterwards we went to a sushi restaurant in Brussels. I ate sea weed, two types of the stuff. I am a vegetarian, but this stuff was not exactly what I needed after two long days on my feet… I was so happy they had a big box of vegetarian noodles for me.
Thanks to everyone who helped to make this a excellent weekend.
Hi Wendy,
Meeltje and you are on this nice FOSDEM movie (at 0:59): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPh0lhL_Nx8&hd=1
Hi Claudio,
Meelte is at that timeframe in the film.
You can find me at 3:41, wagging Meeltje’s tail.
It’s a lovely movie.
Hi Claudio, thank you for the report and the nice pictures.
[...] talking with a lot of people at the Perl booth at FOSDEM I was positively surprised by the level of interest in (modern) Perl. Newbies seemed [...]
[...] Sadly, I didn’t had the time to photograph our fabulous Perl stand (although I have some pictures from last year): Wendy, Liz, Eric and all the other volunteers did a great [...]