Site Messages: do we use these at all?

[foxfirefey]

I'm doing a little before-bed Template Toolkitting as a before-bed easy coding thing--I was thinking of converting the site messages area of the admin to TT, but I'm also wondering if we use it at all, or have plans of doing so, in case what I should be doing is figuring out how to jettison it?

Conference sponsorship

[denise]

I am pleased to announce that this trend of "people giving us money" seems to be continuing, which means that we want to spend more money on y'all. (LET US SPEND MONEY ON YOU. REALLY. STOP THAT IMPOSTOR SYNDROME THINKING RIGHT NOW YES YOU I KNOW WHAT YOU'RE THINKING SO JUST STOP IT I MEAN IT IF YOU ARE READING THIS I MEAN YOU. YES YOU.)

If you have submitted at least five patches to us (since the DW project began) and at least one patch in the last year, we want to register you for YAPC::NA, the Yet Another Perl Conference in Madison, Wisconsin on June 13th - 15th. (Or, if you're not in North America, we'd be happy to send you to a local Perl conference of similar cost, if you know of one.)

There's also a two-day "Zero to Perl" workshop that I will be attending, and if you're newer to working in Perl (or to programming in general!) and think that you'd get some use out of it, I'd love for you to come keep me company. We'll also pay the registration fee for that workshop.

The small print: We reserve the right to put a cap on the number of attendees we send. (We're thinking a limit of 20 people total, and 4 people for the workshop; this may be adjusted based on interest.) I'm not sure yet if we'll register you and pay the conference directly, or if we'll ask you to register and pay and reimburse you; it depends on interest level and on how easy the conference makes it to do third-party invoices. We cannot, unfortunately, pay your travel costs (hotel or airfare) -- this year, at least! who knows about the future? If you almost qualify but not quite, you can have until the end of May to get your five patches in. If travel cost is prohibitive but there's more-local conferences or training you'd like to attend, let me know and we'll see what we can do. To take advantage of this, contact me at denise at dreamwidth.org and let me know you're interested, and we'll go from there.

And, a reminder, if travel isn't possible for you for whatever reason, we still want to buy you books or other resources!

(I really, really mean it on the impostor-syndrome thing. I have heard at least three of you who would qualify under the buy-you-stuff guidelines say that you don't think you do enough for DW to 'deserve' it. TOTALLY NOT TRUE. If you're coding for DW, we want to give you the tools to do it more efficiently and with greater skill. Period, end of sentence, full stop.)


EDIT: pauamma has also linked me to YAPC::EU, which will be in Frankfurt, August 20-22. Mark and I will not be able to go to that one, but if you're in the EU and that would be cheaper/easier/more convenient for you to go to, we can totally talk about sending you to that one! I can't say for sure that we'd be able to -- I need to research costs a bit more, etc -- but do check it out.