About the German Perl Workshop

The last week I was in Germany. First I spent one day at the German Perl Workshop in Schorndorf (near Stuttgart) and then 4 days at LinuxTag in Berlin.

My flight left at 5:00 am on Sunday which meant I could not get much sleep the night before. Luckily I could sleep on the plane. The connection in Zurich is funny. At every gate and door the signs directing you to the other terminal also include the time it takes to get there. That can calm you down quite a bit as you know what to expect.

After landing in Stuttgart I took the train to Schorndorf where Rolf Schaufelberger picked me up. We found out that the tuits have not arrived yet. I sent out a quick message to the supplier without much hope as they are in the US and by the time they see the e-mail I'd already be leaving. Rolf has a very nice house with a garden and if I wasn't that tired I would even helped him cutting the lawn. Instead of that I just fell asleep.

In the evening we drove to Stuttgart to meet the people at the pre-conference pub. There were a couple of people from Munich already and within an hour we were I think some 20 people there. Including mst with his, well, hair. You have to see it for yourself.

On Monday early morning we went to Schorndorf. First we went to the office of PlusW, the company Rolf runs and we were partially happy. The tuits have arrived but someone had to pick them up from the tax authorities.

Once we arrived they setup the registration table and I setup an extension to it where I would catch people and try to talk to them about the events group and in parallel try to do some fund-raising for TPF by selling some shirts.

See pictures of the registration table at GPW

I also managed to get a 10 min slot just after the opening speech of Rolf to talk about the Perl events group. From the feedback later that day it is clear I still have to improve the message and that no matter what, personal conversations in small groups have way bigger effects than talks in front of a crowd. Nevertheless I need to improve the talk and turn it into a 5 min lightning talk so I can offer it at YAPC::NA next week.

In the evening we had the "social event" of the workshop at a near-by pub. The food was good but we had live music that unfortunately made it very difficult to have any reasonable conversation inside. So most of the time while the band was playing I was outside talking to people. I almost missed the sweets.

Unfortunately the next day I had to leave early to catch my flight to Berlin where I was about to setup a Perl booth. That mean I missed all the talks in English. In any case I think it was worth to go for even one day to GPW as I hope I managed to raise some awareness to the events group. For sure two of the participants of GPW (Tina Mueller and Gabi Hack) later came to the Perl booth at LinuxTag to help. I am quite sure some of the others will also help out with the various other events.

Lots of thanks to the organizers and especially Rolf who let me stay in his house.