YAPC::Asia 2015
YAPC::Asia started in 2006 with 300+ attendees. YAPC::Asia 2015 had 2130 attendees.
The first YAPC::Asia had invited speakers of Larry Wall, Yukihiro Matz, Damian Conway and Audrey Tang. This year they invited Larry, Matz, Jonathan and Ricardo among others.
In 2006, Perl 6 was under development and was set to be released by Christmas. This year, it was set to be released by this Christmas.
This year they chose a new venue, Tokyo Big Sight. The venue size is perfect to hold 2000 attendees. The auditorium is big enough to hold most of the attendees, and each room is pretty close to each other to easily access. The smallest rooms only contain 100 people, and it seemed there were some talks that clearly went overflown with its popularity.
There are many things I liked particularly about this year’s YAPC::Asia. The conference was so well organized from the flawless Wi-Fi to the time schedule.
In previous years, most of the talks were either 20 minutes or 40 minutes long, and there weren’t even any break between the time slots, except a few around lunch time and a coffee break.
This year they decided to increase the default time slots to 30/60 minutes, and every talk had 10 minute buffer afterwards. This made sure all the talks had at least 10 minute for questions and answers. Japanese tech audience has been known to be very shy and don’t ask many questions, but this year, most of the talks I attended had so many questions that actually went out of time.
The live interpretation from audience’s question to the speaker via the receiver had seemed to work well, almost like magic, too.
Also, most speakers have been instructed to repeat the questions. This helps a lot when playing back on videos.
This is 10th YAPC::Asia, and every year I go there, I see familiar faces of my friends. It feels almost like an annual reunion event, especially so for people like me visiting from abroad.
It’s sad to see this event go, but I’m sure there will be something that carries this spirit over.