| YAPC::NA (the North American "Yet Another Perl Conference") is my favorite tech conference to attend, probably because it seems to be rather "by perl developers, for perl developers". The YAPC conferences seem to have come about after the original perl conferences became OSCON. The perl community developed something specific to perl again, and something that was more intimate, casual, and affordable. There are YAPC conferences all over the world, like YAPC::EU and YAPC::Asia and others. My experience is only with the North American one, and it's typically 3 days of technical sessions with one or more optional days of more formal classes before or after it. A conference ticket is cheap, say $100, and you can get a dorm room for cheaper than a hotel room if you like. That's part of the effort to make the conference affordable and open to anyone. Another, more recent part of that effort seems to be adopting a more formal code of conduct. I think that's popular with a lot of technical conferences these days. Recently, Schwern, one of the prominent members of the perl community withdrew from the conference and described why here: http://blog.schwern.net/2013/05/15/yapcna-2013-withdrawal/ The article linked from this HN post seems to be a reaction to that. Anyway, YAPC::NA is in Austin this year, and should be a great conference. Check out http://www.yapcna.org/yn2013/ if you want to read more about it. |