London Perl & Raku Workshop 2024

Yesterday we held the 2024 London Perl & Raku Workshop. It was the 20th anniversary of the conference, but it wasn’t the 20th instalment. The previous one was in 2019, just before Covid hit, and it has taken us five years to have another. People often write blog posts about the conferences they have attended, talking about the talks they saw and the people they’ve met. I’ve never done that, but I’m going to try to do it now from an organiser perspective.

Before we start, I would like to give some context to what LPW means to me personally, as an elective Londoner who’s now helped organise a few.

My LPW history

The first LPW I attended was ten years ago, in 2014 (YouTube). It was the tenth instalment of LPW, at a time when Mark organised them on his own, and there were over 200 attendees and three tracks in parallel. Actually, that entire year was full of conference experiences for me.

I was the lead organiser of the German Perl Workshop in Hannover (YouTube), I went to NLPW in Utrecht (YouTube), to YAPC::EU in Sofia (YouTube), and it was only logical I should also go to LPW at the end of the year. While I’d been to the UK many times, mostly doing road trips, I’d never really been to London. And because I was stupid, I flew in in the morning and back out in the evening. No hotel. No pub. No social. It was exhausting, but I didn’t know any better. The most important part of this was probably meeting Rick Deller in person, who would later convince me to move to the UK.

I returned in November 2017, to give my first full-length conference talk at a conference. I’d run one before, I’d done lightning talks, but I’d never done a proper talk. At this point I’d already spoken to my now employer Oleeo (then WCN) on the phone, and the talk became something like my job interview. The conversation that followed began with “when can you start?”, and here I am now.

Naturally I volunteered to help with the 2018 instalment, but only played a small role. I did a lot of on-the-day stuff, including the opening and announcements, but not much in the run-up. In 2019 my role was more hands-on, but I didn’t drive the conference either.

This year, Lee Johnson did most of the work. It was the two of us as the organiser team, but my work really only happened on the day. Lee did all the hard stuff, almost entirely on his own, from Switzerland. Lots of people thanked me for a great event, but I think my strength is being a good host. I can make people feel welcome. Lee deserves all of that credit for getting things going, and I’m very grateful for what he did this year.

Having said all of this, let’s talk about LPW 2024.

Organising LPW 2024

We were in yet a new venue. The previous one was not available anymore, so we had to search. During the day, I got a lot of positive feedback about The Trampery. People liked the vibe of the place, the layout, the lobby with its couches and comfy chairs, the cosy small rooms, and the fact they provided coffee throughout the day without disturbing us. The scarves instead of t-shirts were also very popular, though there was some interest in t-shirts as well.

One piece of constructive feedback I got was that the Library room was too small for some of the talks, and that the TV was too small to see properly when the room was really full. I think this is something we could have solved with better scheduling the talks, putting that particular speaker into the large room instead. But this is only possible if people sign up early and mark which talks they want to attend. Unfortunately it’s tricky to tell people to switch rooms just before their talk. We will remind people to indicate interest in talks in the run-up in the future. As for the TV, it would originally have been even smaller, had the wall mounted TV not fallen off the wall and broken on Friday while we were setting up. It missed Lee by inches, and it made a pretty loud bang.

On the whole, I think this event was a big success. We had a lot of first-time attendees and several first-time speakers. We got a few new sponsors that we didn’t have before. With about 120 people we even had more attendees than YAPC::NA in Las Vegas earlier this year. But sadly there was also a distinct absence of familiar faces. Lots of former attendees have stopped working with Perl, have lost interest, or hadn’t even been reached and didn’t know about it.

My highlights of the conference

What I didn’t do was watch a lot of talks. Thus is the bane of the organiser. The few ones I did see were good quality and entertaining. Dave Lambley talking about Perl in AWS, Leon Timmermans giving an intro to XS, and first-time speaker James Green talking about the Telegram::Bot module he adopted last year, which I have been using myself for a while now, and also Paul Cochrane talking about his debugging journey with crazy maths. I did not have time to give a talk of my own, but I did get to be on stage in a panel discussion with Andrew Solomon about training and teaching people Perl, alongside Dave Cross and – to my delight – the most recent new junior developer in my own team, Jordan Lovett.

I finally managed to have actual conversations with lots of people when we retired to the pub. Catching up with friends and making new ones is always my favourite part of these events. It’s lovely to hear that all of the first-timers I spoke to felt really welcome and like they belonged, even if some talks maybe went over their heads. Making people feel part of the community and being open and inclusive is what the Perl community and events have always been about for me. I am really glad we have still got that, even after several years of an enforced Covid break.

What’s next?

Will there be an LPW next year? I hope so. I would like to keep going, but I will need help. Some people have already contacted me. If you would like to help, please reach out. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you can do. We can find out together.

In the meantime, I’d like to thank all the speakers and everyone else who attended for helping us make a great and hopefully memorable event!