Conferences For Beginners

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The below experience is pretty common amongst conference beginners:

The talks are boring. There, I said it. I respect anyone willing to stand up and talk about what they're working on, what they're thinking, etc, when they're asked, or when no one else will, but all of the speakers are speaking about things that have been all the hype lately...I'd like to be made aware of things that aren't on the radar yet, not things that have been on the radar for six months... 1% of the people here are famous. It's neat seeing Larry, Damian, Audrey, etc cruising around, but I can't talk to them. They're busy. They're hanging out with each other, and their friends, and doing the things they had planned. So I'm left with a bunch of other people...Breaking the ice with people this reserved is hard, and I'm afraid I'm going to wind up bored this evening just like I'm bored now. Unless I can finagle my way into some cool party, that is. But I don't want to be one of those kinds of people....So, gnat and company are having a great time, the Perl novices are learning some basics about what's popular (though not much actual Perl), and everyone else is... bored.

This talk -- inspired by the above and by brian d foy's YAPC::NA talk -- aims to help conference beginners get more out of the conference, to get to hear about the cool parties, and to feel involved.

Stream: Other

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Jacinta Richardson, B Software Eng (Hons), B Sci, has more than eight years of commercial Perl and teaching experience. She is a qualified software engineer and the chief technical writer and course coordinator for Perl Training Australia.

Jacinta is a prominent figure on perlmonks and actively supports many local Australian Open Source user groups such as Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane Perl Mongers, Melbourne and Sydney LinuxChix and various Linux and BSD user groups. In her free time she likes to work in her garden, scuba dive and cook.