Welcome to the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop!

This workshop started innocently enough. The year was 2010 -- October. We were at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop when Brad Lhotsky said he wanted to host a similar workshop in the DC/Baltimore region. I told him no. But then he talked me and some others into it. During 2011 we worked out some details and at the 2011 Pittsburgh Perl Workshop we announced that the first DCBPW would be held April 14, 2012! We even made fliers!

Here we are six wonderful years later. We've had a few of the organizers step back over the years, mostly due to moving away, but we picked up a few others and have a core of dedicated volunteers that put this workshop together every year. We get support from The Perl Foundation and also get support from local businesses and communities. It has gone pretty well! And yet... sometimes I've felt unhappy.

You see, I started to get fantasies of grandeur.

I imagined a hundred people showing up! Two hundred! Each year this didn't happen I was a little sad. Perl dying? Community dying? What's going on that a region with probably a thousand perl developers only have 50 show up to a really awesome and cheap conference?

And then I realized -- This isn't a conference! It's a workshop.

What we have is a true "workshop". A set of people focused on learning new things, getting introduced to new ideas, and getting some hands-on time. We have organized pre-planned presentations, but we also have a lot of hallway time and variety. Then the second day is completely hands-on time. The signal-to-noise ratio is fantastic -- each attendee gets a chance to learn from their peers both formally and informally.

So yeah. It's small. That's not a bug, it's a feature :)