Dublin.pm

Aidan Kehoe and I had a very small but interesting Dublin.pm meeting that night. Their first since 2004! Our wide-ranging discussions that night included me trying to understand what led Dublin.pm to flounder instead of flourish. I think a key factor was the (implicit?) expectation that members should make technical presentations.

Living in the west of Ireland there aren’t enough local Perl users (that I’ve found so far) to have a viable Perl Mongers group. So I setup the Limerick Open Source meetup instead.

Here’s what worked for us: We sit around in a quiet comfy hotel bar and chat. Naturally the chat tends towards the technical, and laptops are produced and turned around to illustrate a point or show results of a search, a chunk of video etc. There’s no set agenda, no declared topics, and no presentations. And yet, I think it’s fair to say, that everyone who’s come along has learnt interesting (albeit random) stuff.

I’d like to hear from perl mongers, in groups of all sizes, what kinds of balance between the social and technical aspects of Perl Mongers meetings works (or doesn’t work) for you.

OSSBarcamp

At OSSBarcamp I gave a ~15 minute ‘lightning talk’ on Devel::NYTProf in the morning, and a ~50 minute talk on Perl Myths in the afternoon.

The Perl Myths talk was a major update to my previous version, now over 18 months old, incorporating lots of updated graphs and other fresh information.

There is so much happy vibrant productive life in the Perl community that updating the presentation has been lovely experience. I keep having to revise the numbers on the slides upwards. There are lots of great graphs and they’re all going upwards too! (Many thanks to Barbie for the great new graphs of CPAN stats.)

I’ve put a PDF of the slides, with notes, on slideshare. Best viewed full-screen or downloaded.

I made a screencast but I think I’ll hang on to that until after I give the same talk, updated again, at the Italian Perl Workshop (IPW09) in Pisa in October — I’m really looking forward to that! I’ll make another screencast there and decide then which to upload.

After OSSBarcamp last week, and before IPW09 in late October, I’ll be flying to Moscow, visa permitting, to give a talk at the HighLoad++ (translated) conference. I’ve never been to Russia before so that’s going to be an amazing experience!

My talk on Devel::NYTProf seemed to go well. This year I covered not just NYTProf and the new features in v3 (not yet released) but also added a section on how to use NYTProf to optimize your perl code.

Here’s a quick summary, with links to the slides and screen-cast, and outline what’s still to be done before v3 gets released (getting closer by the day).The first two-thirds of the talk covered general profiling topics and an overview of NYTProf v3. This was an updated and compressed version of the talk I gave last year.

The final third covered optimization techniques.

I began with stern warning against optimization unless there’s a clear need, followed by a selection of quotes, among which is the well known classic from Donald Knuth: “premature optimization is the root of all evil”. What few people remember is that that’s just a fragment of a more balanced statement:

“We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.”

After getting an implicit nod from Donald I quoted Rob Pike on the importance of measurement:

“Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don’t try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you have proven that’s where the bottleneck is.”

Then I outlined the sequence of steps I usually take when performance profiling and optimizing code. These were grouped into three phases: “Low Hanging Fruit”, “Deeper Changes”, and “Structural Changes”.

I’ve generated a PDF of the slides and made it available on slideshare.net. I’ve also uploaded the 45 minute screencast to my blip.tv channel.

Let me know if you find them useful.

“2 days of conference, 2 simultaneous tracks, more than 30 talks, 120 attendees, 20 sponsors and many international guests”

The whole event ran very smoothly thanks to a great team lead by Gianni Ceccarelli, Francesco Nitido, and Enrico Sorcinelli. I’ll echo the compliments of one attendee “Complimenti sinceri agli organizzatori! Bravissimi! Tutto perfetto!“

I gave short talk on Gofer on the Thursday, and then two 40 minutes talks on Friday: Perl Myths, and Devel::NYTProf. I hope to upload screencasts and slides next week. The talks were all recorded on video so I imagine they’ll be uploaded at some point. I’ll add links here to them when they are.

The majority of the sessions were in Italian so, since my Italian is practically non-existant, I had plenty of time to work.

Or at least try to. The one disappointment of the trip for me was the apparent poor quality of the Italian internet. Using mtr I’d regularly see over 20% packet loss within telecomitalia.it and interbusiness.it from my hotel room. Occasionally over 50%. It got much better at night, so I’d do more work then. At the conference venue the Italian academic network (garr.net) also regularly had over 20% packet loss at its link to the internet. All this was, of course, outside the control of the organisers.

The “corridoor track” at perl conferences is always good. I had a chance to talk to Rafel Garcia-Suarez (and meet his lovely wife and new baby son), Matt S Trout, Hakim Cassimally, Michel Rodriguez, Marcus Ramberg, and many others.

I had opted to take a very early fight so I’d have a day being a tourist in Pisa before the conference started. The weather was beautiful and I had a lovely time strolling though the streets of this ancient city.

I didn’t take my camera with me, but I did take my iPhone so I was able to capture a few snaps as I strolled around and climbed the tower. (Yes, it really does lean in a disconcerting “it must be about to fall down” way. All the more dramatic when you’re up close and can appreciate the massive scale of the tower.)

Two versions of the slides are available: one with just the slides on a landscape page, and another with slides and notes on a portrait page.

I also have a screencast of the presentation which I hope to edit and upload before long. (I’ll update this page and post a new note when I do.)

These items are from a great talk on “A Streaming Database” by Rafael J. Fernández-Moctezuma at PDXPUG day.

Hancock is a C-based domain-specific language designed to make it easy to read, write, and maintain programs that manipulate large amounts of relatively uniform data. In addition to C constructs, Hancock provides domain-specific forms to facilitate large-scale data processing

The CQL continuous query language (google)

Borealis is a distributed stream processing engine. Borealis builds on previous efforts in the area of stream processing: Aurora and Medusa.

CEDR is the Complex Event Detection and Response project from Microsoft Research.

Google Protocol Buffers “allow you to define simple data structures in a special definition language, then compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the language of your choice”.
Which seems like Thrift which is “a software framework for scalable cross-language services development. It combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between langauges”.

I’ll be speaking about something Perl’ish, naturally.

The “Perl Myths” presentation I gave at IWTC earlier this year turned out to be a hit. (At least, it was after the event. There were less than ten people in the room at the time, including me! Perl clearly isn’t a hot topic among Irish web developers.)

My blog post, with embedded slides and video, has topped 7400 hits, plus another 3000 or so views on slideshare.

I’m upgrading my methods for this next talk. I’ve bought a great wireless USB microphone and the amazing
ScreenFlow screencasting software to capture everything in detail.

So I’m going all high-tech. No more “camcorder perched on a chair at the back” for me!

It’ll be a good trial run for OSCON where I’m speaking in July.