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!

I liked the slide text so much I wanted to share it with you:

Perl:

has a massive library of reusable code
has a culture of best practice and testing
has a happy welcoming growing community
has a great future in Perl 5 and Perl 6
is a great language for getting your job done
    for the last 20 years, and the next 20!

It would make more sense after seeing the talk, but I think it stands well on its own as a summary of Perl.

It needs updating though, and that’s where you can help…

It’s a strongly fact base talk with lots of graphs, numbers, and references. A lot has happened in the Perl community since I wrote the talk over 18 months ago!

Lots of the information needs to be checked and updated. The jobs graphs are easy, as are the basic CPAN numbers.

I’d like to get updated versions of: the graph of CPAN uploads (slide 23), test counts for perl 5.10.1 (slide 44), the graph of cpan-testers reports (slide 47).

One item that’s not in the slides, which were written in Feb 2008, but is in the screencast made later at OSCON (at 7:00) is the statement that “One quarter of all CPAN distributions have been updated in the last 4 months! Half of all in the last 17 months!” That’s an impressive and important statistic but it need updating. I think I got that from Schwern’s excellent “Perl is unDead” talk, but I don’t know how he got the figures or, more importantly, how to update them. (And schwern.org seems down so I can’t get the slides.)

At OSCON I also talked about myths relating to Perl 6 (again, not in the old slides, but starting at 19:20 in the screencast). I’d like to cover Perl 6 when I talk in Dublin in September, but the status of Parrot and Perl 6 has changed in the last 18 months even more than Perl 5. So I need help with good sources of hard data for Parrot and Perl 6, similar to what I have in the screencast but updated.

More generally, I’m also looking for new sources of information — hard data about the vigourous health of perl and its community. Have you seen any relevant talks/slides or blog posts you can recommend?

Can you help with any of the above?

Thank you in advance!

“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”

A challenging statement. Having seen the lecture now I can understand why it has been so popular, and is so important. I came across it recently and felt it was worth sharing.

You can watch it on YouTube here as a series of bite-size 9 minute clips.

(After that you might like this unrelated take on applying risk management.)

“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.)

“Perl has it’s share of myths. This presentation debunks a few popular ones with hard facts. Surprise yourself with the realities.”

While I agree with Andy Lester that Good Perl code is the best form of evangelism, I wanted to put together a presentation that others could refer to when they encounter misinformation about Perl. I cover these myths that I’ve heard recently:

• Perl is dead
• Perl is hard to read / test / maintain
• Perl 6 is killing Perl 5

and pull in a wealth of upto date information, some of it quite surprising even to those familiar with Perl and its community. There are two versions, plus a video. I recommend the one with notes (which have useful extra detail and context for the slides) which is best viewed as a PDF. There’s also one without notes which I’ve embedded here:

I videoed an extended version of this presentation at IWTC in Dublin in February. The first 40 minutes or so correspond with the slides above. In the remaining 30 minutes or so I talk about Parrot and Perl 6. I’ve embedded the video below, but wordpress forces me to use a small size so you’ll probably prefer to view it at video.google.com: