Miniconf NYC - a free Perl conference

May 14, 2015 by David Farrell

Just when you thought there couldn’t be more NYC based Perl events, another comes along! I’m one of the organizers for Miniconf a free Perl conference that’s running here in New York on Saturday June 6th, two days day before YAPC::NA. There’s also a pre-conference social event, and you can sign up for both events on meetup.

What to expect

We have two large rooms for the day, one for training and the other for the hackathon. Taking our cue from the recent NYC Perl hackathon, for our hackathon we’re going to cluster attendees around projects they’re interested in working on, and each project team will have a leader responsible for helping attendees get up to speed. I like this approach because it’s newbie friendly, and encourages a productive use of the time. We’ve got a few teams already:

• Do you know Perl 5 and are interested in Perl 6? Then you might be interested joining my team which is converting Perl 5 modules to Perl 6.
• Want to contribute to core Perl 5 development? Join the “Show core modules some love” team led by Richard Elberger and help close a few tickets.
• Interested in Mojolicious web development? Help Curtis Brandt hack on Mojo::Snoo

If you have a hackathon project you’d like to work on, email us and we’ll add it to the website. Of course, solo hackers are welcome too :)

For training, in the morning we have brian d foy delivering his popular “Become a CPAN author in three hours” course. This is a great introductory course for aspiring CPAN contributors - learn how to create a Perl distribution, package it up and upload it to CPAN. Contributing to CPAN is one of the most fun and rewarding things a Perl developer can learn - once your distribution is on CPAN, anyone can use it and benefit from it - how cool is that? It’s also interesting to get to know the Perl toolchain, and how systems like CPAN and PAUSE work. We currently have an afternoon training slot available.

We’re going to see the day out with lightning talks - always a fun affair. At the moment we’re thinking the project teams can give a lightning talk to describe their progress for the day, but it might make sense to just have a more general lightning talk slot - if you want to give a lightning talk, email us. I’ll probably give a talk on one of my dumber modules.

How to help

Spread the word! We’re promoting the event through social media and other outlets (like this website, see the banner ad). Follow the Miniconf Twitter feed - we’ll use it to communicate conference updates.

We’re also looking for sponsors, if you work for a company interested in reaching New York based programmers, give them our email address, or even better send them introductory email cc’ing admin@mini-conf.com. With sponsors we’re trying something a little bit different, we have sponsorship slots for particular aspects of the conference. So an organization can be the “pizza and soda sponsor” to make a more visible link between a sponsor’s contribution and the benefits of the conference. Every sponsor gets their logo on the conference website, on the big screens during the conference, and promotion through social media. We’re also running a “swag” table for sponsors to contribute merchandise, an obvious win-win, as the sponsor gets brand promotion and the attendees get free stuff!

As a programmer and tech conference regular myself, I’m trying to create the kind of conference that I’d want to go to. If you have any questions or suggestions, email us. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone there!

This article was originally posted on PerlTricks.com.