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Rediscovering the Value of In-Person Conferences at YAPC::Kyoto 2023
I recently participated in a conference called YAPC::Kyoto 2023. They say YAPC isn't over until you've written a blog post, so I'm a bit late, but here is my report.
Reasons for Participating
I don't write Perl at all, so I hadn't originally planned to attend YAPC. However, when I met onk-san for the first time in a while at a Findy event recently, he told me, "You absolutely have to come," so I decided to participate in YAPC::Kyoto. I had also been feeling like I wanted to attend an offline conference after such a long time, and I felt that if I were to attend my first offline conference in a while, it should be YAPC, which I consider to be the community that raised me. Since I was participating in an offline conference for the first time in a while, I wanted to give a presentation myself, so I submitted a proposal and ended up speaking.
The location, Kyoto, was also a draw. Kyoto is a place full of memories from my student days, as I lived there for about a month and a half while participating in a Hatena internship. Also—and I plan to write a separate blog post about this—there were some shrines in Kyoto I had been meaning to visit, and I'm glad I was able to visit most of them.
About the Presentation Content
When submitting the proposal, I thought about what kind of content would be best. Although I don't use Perl, I felt that if I were to present, I wanted to talk about a technical topic. Since I understand that YAPC has long served as a place where presentations can be given regardless of the language, I decided to present on how to do system programming in Go, which is something I haven't had much chance to talk about before.
Some people might think that if it's a talk about Go, I should just present it at a Go conference. However, as you can see from the slides, while it looks like a talk about Go, about half of it requires talking about C, making it a difficult topic for a language-specific conference. In that regard, YAPC is a place where no one fusses about the specific language, and there are many people who enjoy low-level topics like system programming, so I thought it would be well-received.
However, when I started creating the presentation materials, I ended up with so much content that it couldn't all be explained in 20 minutes; I felt it needed 40 minutes. Since I only had 20 minutes, I decided to keep the omitted content as columns in the slides but skip mentioning them during the presentation. I received several questions after the talk, and many of them were about things written in the columns I had skipped. While I slightly regretted that I should have mentioned them during the talk, I decided to take it positively, as it meant people were listening to the presentation that intently.
At YAPC, it's possible to give presentations on technical topics that require knowledge of various languages, so I'd like to thank them for accepting my talk.
About ChatGPT
At YAPC, many speakers mentioned the trending topic of ChatGPT. It felt like about half of the presenters touched on it in some way.
I also experimented with how I could leverage ChatGPT while creating my presentation materials. My impressions were:
- It was hardly useful for creating content on technical and niche topics like this one.
- When I had it proofread my materials, it pointed out confusing expressions, typos, and cases where the explanation was insufficient.
As a result, I realized that it is extremely convenient for proofreading materials. There's no doubt it will be a powerful ally for writing.
While it might be useful for content creation depending on the topic, my impression is that it's probably difficult for technical conference presentations.
Other Presentations
I felt that moznion-san's speaking skills and ability to articulate ideas were truly incredible.
In Mikami-san's presentation, "Know-how for operating object storage exceeding 4PB (petabytes) from hardware to applications," I wanted to ask more questions about storage operations, but I didn't think it was appropriate for me to be the only one talking, so I narrowed my questions down to a few points.
Regarding kazeburo-san's talk on DNS benchmarks, I felt that the results were pretty much as I expected.
Ohnishi-san's keynote really resonated with me. I myself participated in a Hatena internship when I was a student, and that experience led me to decide to enter this industry. Recalling that, I felt strongly about the importance of cherishing and maintaining the connections within this community.
Best LT Award
I was truly happy that Tsuchiya-san, who is interning at the same company as me, won the Best LT Award.
Tsuchiya-san also presented at the pre-event. The pre-event aimed to increase the number of young presenters, an initiative I strongly agree with. I hope such attempts continue, and I believe it is very significant that Tsuchiya-san gained the successful experience of winning the Best LT Award through that opportunity.
You can find more details here.
Memories
Since I had a speaker ticket, I first gave my real name at the reception, but my name couldn't be found because I was registered by ID on the list. However, Nyanko-san from the staff said, "You're fine with a face pass," and processed my registration. It was very funny, and I was glad to have this kind of communication offline.
Thoughts
Due to the fact that offline conferences weren't held for three years, there might be events where know-how has been lost. During that time, people who became professionals or remained students came this far without being able to form horizontal connections. At this offline conference, communication happened easily, and I could see participants gradually regaining the feeling of being at a conference.
I can still never forget the excitement and impact I felt when I first participated in YAPC::Asia as a student. Experiences during student days have a huge impact on life, and I feel that receiving high-quality stimulation while young leads to subsequent growth. From the fact that YAPC puts effort into supporting students, I can feel the organizers' intention to actively welcome young people as a community. I felt once again that this is a truly wonderful initiative, as I believe it will have a positive impact not just on the community but on the industry as a whole.
I myself started accepting interns at my company because I wanted young people to have various experiences. However, this generation is also one that couldn't receive stimulation or create horizontal connections due to COVID-19. The loss suffered by this generation due to these "blank three years" will likely be talked about for years to come.
It's easy to lament that. Indeed, we cannot change the past, but we can change the future. It is important to create new history in the new conferences that will be revived from now on. I believe the organizers made that a reality.
Regarding Perl, I used to use it occasionally because it was convenient being installed by default on OSs, but recently, Perl is sometimes not included in minimal OS configurations. Also, as the use of containers for application execution environments has increased, OSs with fewer dependencies are preferred. Perl, which used to be usable anywhere, is now becoming somewhat inconvenient.
I hope YAPC continues as a community that talks about web technology in general, not just Perl. To that end, I intend to continue supporting the community in my own way.
By the way, I had ChatGPT proofread this blog post. While the text generated by ChatGPT sounds plausible, it's difficult to use as-is, and it was faster to write from scratch after all. However, I found it very useful for proofreading, so I highly recommend it.
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