Hello everybody -

YAPC::NA 2012, which will be in Madison, WI from June 13 through June 15,
has officially opened up for presentations! You can read more on their
website here:
http://blog.yapcna.org/post/16510858837/call-for-presenters-open-for-yapc-na-2012

JT Smith, the man spear-heading this year's YAPC::NA, gave a talk at the
Chicago Perl Mongers last night. They are giving preference this year to
real-world Perl apps and quintessential Perl 101 talks. JT's example talk
last night was about a Perl web application that underlies a small-batch
card and board game publishing business called GameCrafter. YAPC allows for
multiple submissions of varying length including lightning talks (30s? 1
min?), five minutes, 20 minutes, 50 minutes, and 110 minutes. The latter
two are typically run as workshops and are more ideal for Perl 101 sorts of
things.

I believe that we should make an effort as a community to attend and
present at this year's YAPC. I told JT that I am very interested in
presenting about PDL and he suggested a strategy to maximize interest: give
talks of increasing length. The goal of such a strategy would be to get
people gradually more interested in PDL so that by the time the workshop
rolls around, they are enthusiastic and willing to spend one or two hours
learning PDL instead of doing something else at the conference.

Joel Berger has already made a few suggestions, including "Modeling
Electron Dynamics with Modern Object Oriented Perl" for 20 minutes, and
some sort of XS 101 talk. I am interested in demoing some of my simpler
Prima-based simulation scripts that I have used in my research, which could
easily be a five-minute or a 20-minute talk entitled "Interactive Visual
Simulations using PDL and Prima". Obviously I'd like to give a talk about
my Prima plotting library, probably a 20-minute talk entitled
"PDL::Graphics::Prima - A 2D Plotting Library written in Perl". Then, of
course, there will be the "Introduction to PDL". I haven't decided on a
duration for that yet.

Now, there is no guarantee that all of these talks will be submitted, or
even that we *should* submit all of these talks. I would be happy to give a
lightning talk or two about some of my Prima stuff, or try to line-up two
five-minute talks in a row: one on Prima and the next on Gnuplot, if that
seems like a sensible thing to do. The most important thing is that we
communicate our ideas, coordinate our efforts, and discuss everything with
the organizers. I would really like the PDL intro to be scheduled after all
the other PDL talks so that we can build up as much enthusiasm as possible,
and JT promised to help schedule our talks in a preferable order.

So, for this weekend, here are your tasks! :-D

   1. Read the latest version of the PDL::Book.
   2. Make plans to get to Madison this June.
   3. Email editorial suggestions about the PDL::Book to the mailing list.
   4. Consider talking about some of your coolest PDL-based applications.
   5. Email your talk topics to the mailing list.


David

-- 
 "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
  Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
  by definition, not smart enough to debug it." -- Brian Kernighan
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