YAPC::EU 2008 - Not for me

Since I’ve been asked where about at the conference I am I should probably mention that I’m not attending YAPC::EU this year. Despite the excellent job the organisers did last year at the Nordic Perl Workshop a combination of factors stopped me going back to Copenhagen.

The first one (and it’s shallow but true) is that I’ve been there now. I like conferences in places I’ve never been before. If I’m going to spend a chunk of my own cash on travel I want to grab an extra day or two and have a wonder around. While Copenhagen was nice I did most of the city (and the mermaid, the river boat and got very sunburnt) last time I was there.

The second reason is there just ain’t many interesting talks. While there are a handful I’m eagerly awaiting the slides from they are spread out over the entire conference. There are a number I’ve seen, a bunch I’ve no interest in (some in topics I already have a grounding in, some by people I can’t watch for an hour) and only a few that I’d get out of bed early for. And we’re not talking before ten am even for those. I don’t think it’s a perl wide problem - YAPC::Asia had a very interesting line this year and I’m sorry I missed it.

Add those two together and I can’t really justify the time or money. So I’ve saved this years YAPC money and spent it on PyCon UK 2008 instead. It doesn’t require me to suffer through an airport, I’m pretty sure I’ll know almost nothing about any of the sessions beyond what I’ve seen on reddit and similar sites and, considering that work is all python on new projects it can’t hurt for me to pick up some of the same technologies that our developers use.