Category — Enlightened Perl

The current state of play

YAPC::EU::2010::Pisa is just a week or so away and I thought it would be time to talk about the send-a-newbie initiative once again. (If you are unfamiliar with send-a-newbie visit the website at send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org)

As I spoke about previously this initiative was organised last year by Edmund von der Burg to great effect and was taken over by the Enlightened Perl Organisation to continue the good work. This year we had 3 successful applicants and all was going well until a communications SNAFU which has resulted in just one of our “newbies” able to attend (for specific details of the communications problems please talk to me privately, they aren’t suitable for this blog).

The Newbie

So with no undue haste and grandeur allow me to introduce you to Leon Timmermans who will be attending this year thanks to the donations of the wonderful Perl community. If you see Leon at YAPC::Europe make sure to say hello, perhaps buy him a beer in the bar and make him welcome to the conference going community.
I will be unable to attend the conference this year due to my wife having given birth to our first child just four weeks ago and it being a mite too early to attend such ‘fun’ events. I will miss you all and ask you to act as ambassadors for me in welcoming Leon.

Where do we go from here?

Well, now we have completed our first year of the initiative I am taking the time to reflect on what we did and how I will be doing it differently in the future.

1. Paypal is an easy way to collect money but makes a poor location to act as custodian. Paypal is easy to use, but many people do not like/trust its services and for some donating directly to a bank account is simpler and more satisfying. As of next year the money will be controlled by the main EPO account for ease but the funds will be kept separate in the EPO records and only used for the initiative.

2. Promotion of the event (YAPC::EU) and the Initiative should start directly after this years YAPC. This will allow more time to raise awareness, collect donations and allow many more applicants to apply and discuss needs (such as visas etc.).

3. More integration with the other community groups. Promoting the initiative amongst the monger groups so local representation and support can be obtained; tighter co-operation with TPF (though they were and are amazing and donated to this years initiative); co-operation with next years organisers of YAPC and with YEF to get their support and promotion. Also I would like to see information go to colleges to people on Computer Science courses etc., so that they can be targeted for sponsorship, this will most likely be done through local Mongers again.

4. Sorting the sponsors out two months earlier than this year to try and avoid any last minute communication issue(!).

So we end our first year knowing that the initiative works and seeing a road forward to improve the program. We also have funds left over to start the ball rolling next year. Once again I will be doing the rounds, cap in hand, to companies and individuals seeking to raise cash and push out the awareness.

A round of applause…

To all those who have donated and helped out this year I wish to offer my heartfelt thanks. You are all excellent people. To everyone else I urge you to seek these people out and thank them (or buy them a beer). To the companies and organisations I offer congratulations on doing a fine job of helping to support the community and I look forward to speaking to you about doing the same again .

This week I was going to talk a bit more about branding since I am at Disney in Florida with my (Disney-obsessed) wife again…but instead I thought I’d wade an oar (love those mixed-metaphors) into something else…

I had to respond as well…

Groditi made an interesting post in response to SawyerX ‘s post about website branding (that you can view here and the original post). Mostly, if I follow the argument (and no insult is intended if I read this wrong or have paraphrased too much), his point is that this adds little to the sum of Perl for the developer as they already have CPAN and other resources and it is more useful to have good documentation and easy to maintain/search libraries of code, so why all this extraneous ‘blah blah blah’. This is true. To be honest I see no fault in what he has said, potentially developers should have nice sites to look good with the only reason being as a selling point for their marketable skills. They aren’t the most important thing if you are interested in development, and to them that ‘icing’ which is a nice site can be an irrelevant fluff that is almost not worth the debating space.

I’m not trying to contradict that point of view, or say it is inaccurate, I just think there is another point to be made and it is the important point for me, it is the one I usually ‘bang on about’ at some length to people if they happen to find themselves caught between me and a bar often in a post-conference reference. That is that the sites are NOT (just an emphasis not a shout) just for developers. In fact the front page is a good place to point fledgling users at the correct resources, and hey, if you can get the domain name is user/search engine friendly as well, because I heard some people use search engines (sarcasm is inappropriate but useful for the over-stating of a point). But it is also a place that we can point managers, bosses, colleagues, newbie’s, place on advertising, link to (without the linking becoming deprecated as the many modules/libraries documentation can) and generally promote. Because, although it is the developers (and I have never under-sold how much I admire any developer) who ultimately make best use of this end product (they shape and form it, the are inspired by it and go to create and develop it), they are not always the ones who are in charge of using it.

The sad, and prevalent, fact is that we need to capture the mindshare of the other people in our industry. The non-developers. The web enthusiasts, the designers and project managers, the bosses and our technical colleagues. We need to show them sites that they can easy navigate not to learn how to use a module or where to find out where the cool cats hang out, but just to know what it is. To see if it is of use to them. To make it the spoken about ‘item’. No there is no real value to this. Yes it is intrinsically a horrid thing that we have to tell people this when we should just be using the great tools of a good toolbox. But if we are forced to stop using the tools because no one wants to have them, or doesn’t know they are good, or prefers the easier-to-find cheaper-to-buy available-everywhere from a snake oil salesman – then we are totally Betamax (reference for old dudes).

So I am not trying to sell my marketing just to you. I am trying to sell it to everyone.

To all those who see no reason in this and perhaps even in marketing. I am, though, still going to target you. Because you are a hard act to win. I am giving you nothing and there is no need to grab you, you are already here. But if we can, if you can see that this adds rather than detracts/does nothing, if you see the purpose, then we are maybe on a very good track. I am not trying to win a concession, just trying to follow the right path.

The necessary aside…

Also known as the Reason Why…
AKA Jill’s favourite Soup Recipe…

There were one or two comments on Groditi’s blog and I am going to talk about them here. I would have left this all as a comment, but then I realised I was writing a post and I didn’t want to start blasting a long response that may seem derogatory/inflammatory or contradictory as i didn’t really disagree (see above). Also, i feel it is rude to start using someone else’s comments area as a forum for debate hence I will talk about them here.

A…cardboard…slop-soaker…interesting…

(I spilled my drink and made the table sloppy, I wish I had an appropriately themed device to rest the glass upon…)

A few people have mentioned that they think the beermats are wasting money that could be used to make better sites/write documents. Well, yes, I guess, but the beermats were made to give out at a conference and other similar events, they are for when you don’t have time to sit someone down and show them the website or explain things. Also they are for when you have had a few jars of sarsaparilla and want to make sure they remember the thing you just pontificated about at length the next cheery, over-beery morn. They are also conference giveaways intended to stick in the memory, so people take them and maybe look into what they are saying/selling. Their cost was marginal (within bounds) and the need for them was not decided by anyone person, it was suggested to the entire EPO membership and they voted upon it.

I would like to help re-design sites as well but there are more factors here than what you are hinting at. For instance the beermats took a relatively small amount of time to produce, a website design takes quite a lot longer. The design and work to produce the mats was done for free – which is comparable to, say, website design costs done for free. What you should compare with the cost to produce the beermats is the cost to host the sites and resources. Both of these have to be paid as no-one can volunteer it (though the EPO and other community sites get some of the costs donated/ameliorated usually by companies or individuals in the community). So when you say we used money to produce the beermats that could have been used to design the websites you are seeing the picture skewed (ever so slightly), we didn’t take any money/resources away from anything, we allocated what we thought was the best use of those resources, it was a membership decision not a single person guessing.

Also I should point out that the cost to ship the beermats was covered by donation, so the EPO didn’t even foot that bill, so all-in-all the beer mats were a good value promotional item (there are still some available to be given away if you have an acceptable venue).

Loan-A-Designer

As for finding companies with designers free to donate time to redesign sites/logos, as was also suggested, – well YAY. Yes. Please. If anyone knows people, has the time, wants to help. Then get in touch I know I have stuff that needs work and I can certainly find others if mine are all taken. They are all community sites/projects and they all would appreciate the help.

Once again, please don’t read this as an attack on what has already been said/written, it is just another way of shaving this particular hairy creature.

-ttfn – Mark

For those of you who have been keeping up-to-date with things we are working on a new version of the Ironman feed which will be called all.things.per.ly and is currently being developed as Ironboy by the members of northwestengland.pm and their associated friends who hang out on irc.perl.org in the #northwestengland.pm. channel.

This post is just to let you know that we have finally worked through a lot of the issues we were having with feed subscriptions (language issues) and working to weed out spam signups as well as developing code for the Perlanet which is replacing Plagger as the code the site runs on (well, sort of, there’s Catalyst and stuff in there as well, but someone else will be outlining the tech specs in a future post).

The eventual plan for the Ironboy code, once it is up and powering all-things.per.ly is to rip out Plagger from the current ironman.enlightenedperl.org and replace it with Ironboy (using Perlanet) this should help us to fix some issues such as the badge updates (finally).

Well keep watching as this will soon be a reality and we can all gush and say cool, now let’s have this feature…

If you want to help us bring the next generation of Ironman into existence then join the channel mentioned above and state you want to help.

I should not that my co-conspirator-leader Ian Norton (idn on irc) has been the principal force and focus for this project and all extra bits of kudos that are left over from praising all the people who are working on this should be gathered up and heaped on his impressive shoulders.

-ttfn – Mark

Having a certain swagger…

By now I hope most of you have been following Gabor Szabo‘s and Renée Bäcker’s efforts to get Perl promoted at non-Perl conferences (see events on the TPF wiki here) and like me are in support. Their efforts are supported by The Perl Foundation, the YAPC Europe Foundation and the Enlightened Perl Organisation all of whom have helped by supplying funds/items to give away at the booth/event.

Wherever I lay my pint…

So the EPO have produced a set of Beer Mats as promotional items. About 1,000 of these mats will be sent to the CeBit conference to be given away (see more details on the CeBit Perl attendance on the Wiki page on TPF wiki), but there are another 2,000 of these items available and if you have an event, know of an event, where technical people may gather and would like some beermats to give away, then please contact Mark (the owner of this blog) at m.keating(at)shadowcat.co.uk and request some. We will deliberate and decide if it is a worthwhile request (don’t be shy, that’s just to stop people saying they want one for their beer mat collection – though go to a conference, add your support and grab some if that’s the case).

What they look like?

Well I am glad you asked. The beermats all share a common background image and the front is three different projects that are part of the EPO supported projects. They are displayed below. Enjoy .

Back Image of the beermats

-ttfn – Mark

What is it? It’s it…

The Send a Newbie program is designed to introduce new people to YAPC’s by collecting sponsorship from supporting companies. It was successfully run by Edmund von der Burg last year, but due to other circumstances Edmund has decided to pass the reins on this year and asked the Enlightened Perl Organisation to pick them up.

Where’s it at?

The website is now up at send-a-newbie.enlightenedperl.org (also sendanewbie.enlightenedperl.org) and there is already a Donate button on the front page if you feel magnaminous and want to make a donation. All contributions will be published on a donations page (though the option to donate anonymously will be offered if requested).

The send-a-newbie was originally done for YAPC::EU and had three people sponsored to attend. This year the Perl Foundation (TPF) will also be organising a send-a-newbie for the YAPC::US and we wish them all the luck in their endeavours. Hopefully the two programs will continue to work together and maybe we can get groups to do this at the other YAPCs worldwide.

Who can do it?

The EPO believe that the send-a-newbie should be open to everyone. The program is being run by Rosellyne Thompson and Mark Keating and they will be happy to answer questions & queries, send an email to  send-a-newbie(at)enlightenedperl.org.

-ttfn – Mark

This is the first article based upon my Keynote that I presented this year and is part of a series of articles on the Terrible Things We All Must Do.

Meanwhile…

While I was writing this article I was also checking the web and eagerly awaiting the keynote from Apple and their possible latest release, I know I am such a fracking fanboi or something, or maybe I just like cool devices, slinky sci-fi-esque toys – look I am a child of the 70s, this is all futuristic to me man. Also, Bubble Wrap is 50 years old today, so much fun from something so simple as the “Tension Sheet”.

She links me yeah, yeah, yeah

In my Keynote at the Oasis Perl Workshop (see my post last week) I mentioned that I would like to see a giant daisy chain of Perl sites. What I meant by this was down to obvious things we must do and a significant element missing from many Ironman Posts.

The obvious thing is to remember to name drop sites and people in your blogs, Twitter et al., of the people and places, especially Perl related, that you have been-seen-done-wanted-heard-insertownthing. Not only that, you must also link to them, and if you’re link isn’t obvious from its context as to what it is then you better do this, you better link twice, ’cause otherwise you’ll be naughty not nice. As an example, consider the request Miyagawa made of us to mention the best Perl Web Server (Plack) – you see not only do I link the phrase to follow in context I also name the thing and link that as well.

The element missing from many Ironman posts is a link to the Ironman Competition itself and the Planet Homepage. This is fairly poor people. There will be other visitors to your sites, not just those from the Ironman site, a link (or even use the banner I made or one of your own) will be very useful. There are something over 7000 posts on the Ironman archive and only 6300 links to Ironman on the internet, so even if the links are only from Blogs on this site that is a shortfall. Personally I think there is probably about half of them that don’t link to here – so make sure you do link on every post. Also try to link to the sign-up page so we get new competitors.

Socialise…

We need to make sure we link to each other and to make those links relevant, it is a tool we can use to make sure things are found  by people searching for information. By using the social media sites to talk about Perl and the things happening in our universe we can promote and raise awareness of the tools and language we all hold dear.

btw, as a matter of yet more praise I have to say that there are people to whom I owe much regard as they already do this to a great extent, one of those is my business partner Matt S. Trout and another is the (afore praised as magnificent) Dave Cross. They are not on their own, there are many others and we should join with them.

</rant>

A further article in this series will follow (maybe next week)

-ttfn – Mark

Fun – fun – fun in the sun – sun – sun

Last Saturday was the Perl Oasis conference in Orlando Florida arranged, orchestrated and conducted by the Orlando Perl Mongers in the fleshy guise of Chris and Jamie (notice how those two names could be used by either of them?).

The Organisers looking busy

The conference is a relatively small affair attracting a core group of presenters and attendees numbering approximately 30 people, and one might think that this lessens the importance in the face of larger workshops and the continental YAPCs, but I say ‘nay’ and perhaps ‘pish and tosh’ to such fallacy. The truth is that this type of event is equally as important as any other. It has its own merits and shortfalls that nicely contrast with a larger event. It would be hard for anyone at a YAPC/similar sized event to be able to get to talk to almost every attendee, and comment to the speakers in person about their talks. It is also very easy to feel on the edge of a crowd, especially if new to conferences at a large event. Perl Oasis has no issues like this. The group size was large enough to gurantee a good range of talks on the schedule, a good number of opinions at the bar and let everyone socialise together. There were new faces at this conference who had not been to a Perl event before and suddenly they were drinking and discussing with the developers and authors of Moose, Plack and Dbic.

The Hallway track was well-attended

The Plays the thing…

I managed to see a good number of talks while at the event, as well as delivering my own rather ranty little keynote. I will get to see all the talks as I videoed the half I didn’t view on the day and will catch up with them during editing and posting online. Those I saw:

Stevan Little – Untitled Number 12 – Stevan brought us uptodate with his current thinking and work in the Perlverse and managed to talk about some of the other projects out and about and steal Miyagawa’s thunder at the same time by talking a lot about Plack.

Stevan points out where the screen is…

Shawn Moore – Surviving in the Cruel, Unforgiving World – What lengths a programmer will do to create a Perl powered bot to tackle a complex game.

Attendees in the talks – everyone has a laptop these days

Tatsuhiko Miyagawa – Plack: State of the art web framework superglue – Plack was a big thing in 2009 and will no doubt make greater impact in 2010, take a look at this exciting web framework/server interface tool. Make sure you click on this link to the Plack homepage and check this out.

Cory Watson – From Zero to CPAN – Adding a new product search to Magazines.com – although not primarily about Perl, Cory is a Perl user amongst other languages and a great conference speaker. He also sponsored this year’s event and was quite the demon for go-kart driving (except when someone killed his iPhone in a reportedly brutal collision).

Cory’s great presenting style – “it was this heavy”

Casey West – Writing a JQuery Plugin – another talk not really about Perl, but I attended to try and learn more about JQuery. Unfortunately for me it was aimed at people who already had a working knowledge. No matter as the talk was still good and Casey did move heaven and Earth to get there arriving late on the day of the conference and almost running into his presentation.

Devin Austin – Google a Summer of Code - Devin spoke about his experience completing the summer of code last year and how this has helped him develop. A good introduction as to why GSOC is important to Open Source and to Perl.

Matt S Trout – The Troll the God and the Mountain – In his indominable style Matt told us an epic story or he told us about developments in Dbic, nobody can be quite sure. My only complaint is that I have to now watch this again to learn about the Dbic stuff as the tale of the two Trolls was so interesting I missed the Perl A must see on the conference circuit or online this year.

It isn’t all fun and games…

The conference was fun and after it was over we retired into the night for the usual food and the Orlando Mongers’ preferred relaxation pursuit, Go Karts. Cory, Jay, Miyagawa, Stevan and mst had already been practicing the previous day (with Cory and Jay doing a lot of practice) and some injury had resulted (to Cory’s iPhone) – there were quite a few people who raced about the track, and some fun from the spectators as they sometimes spun out of control to end up in reverse or were taken by the kids.

Is this a conference organiser being beaten by a small boy?

Shaun, Cory and Jay, just before the infamous spin-out

So the conference was a great event and a good deal of congratulations, praise and general love should be poured onto Jamie and Chris for organising the event, making people happy and welcome and working their asses off to provide us with a great experience.

Shadowcat Systems expressed their gratritude by providing the Perl Mongers of Orlando with a mascot to keep them happy and agreeing to fund next year’s conference and pay towards the conference the year after (2011, 2012).

Niles (on right) and Aurelea (check spelling!) the Orlando PM mascot

Let’s see more of you….but not too many…then

-ttfn – Mark

A superband that will not split….

SO it is just a few short days, nerve-bitingly it is less than 3 days, to the wonderful Perl Oasis held in the – hopefully – sunny city of Orlando in Florida. I am biting my nails because I rather foolishly jumped into the fray and declared, “yes, I shall do a Keynote for you muhahahaha,” what a plonker.

So what is my keynote on? Well you might well ask and I might well answer. Actually I am sort of going to answer, maybe…

I have decided to talk a little about some of the ‘Horrible Things’ that we in the community must do, and the terrible word that links all of this. Some of you may have guessed what this is just by that short description, and the rest of you will have to wait until after the conference for me to tell you.

So why am I mentioning it here? Well I want you all to pay attention to the fact there is a conference. Be upset that you missed it. And resolve to make it there next year. I will, of course be talking about this conference in my blog next week where I may also start my campaign of Awful Things We ALL Must Do.

-ttfn – Mark

This week I am blogging from a line at Paris, Disney. Actually right now I am back in my room and typing this to you but I was in a line when I made notes about this. Why am I in Paris and why Disney? Well the Paris is easy, it is an exotic and beautiful city and visiting it at this time of year is wonderful, it was the first foreign location I went to alone with my wife when we were first dating and therefore holds a special place in my heart. Why Disney, well my wife, like her mother, is a Disneyphillic, she adores the place and her parents paid for us to be here, so again colour me uncomplaining, it is a nice Christmas present.

Perl in the Sun…

But, soon we shall have joy, we shall have fun and we shall discuss Perl in the sun (ouch bad) and this is me telling you all to come along to Perl Oasis in January. Sure it is in Orlando, sure it is soon after Christmas, but it is going to be a great event, except for maybe the keynote, I have some doubts about that, but there again I am writing that.

In fact I am writing my thoughts about it while I stand in these Disney lines. When I told Perigrin about this he thought it was rather apt as the Oasis is in the theme park capitol of the world.

Matt S. Trout and I will both be there from Shadowcat Systems representing the Enlightened Perl Organisation and the North West England Perl Mongers at this so enlightened of conferences.

So go here to the Perl Oasis site, and register.
Look at the great list of talks.
Or say nice things about Perigrin.

-ttfn – Mark

Saturday 12th December was the North West England Perl Mongers 6th Technical meeting of the year and for this month we decided to have a happy Hackathon. So we gathered in the office of Shadowcat Systems who were sponsoring the event with snacks, pizza and beer (as well as a temperamental net connection from a crappy ISP).

[The collection of snacks]

Our goal was to make decent inroads into a new archive for the ironman challenge in Perl that will become a much grander project as time goes on. To do this we would be taking ther current Plagger install and bolting on a new system using Dave Cross’ Perlanet as detailed by the great man himself here (Dave Cross’ Blog post on NWE.PM’s efforts).

[Everyone is hard at it]

The day was extremely succesful. Not only did we get eight people in the office, but a further three joined us online for the event (though IDN was working on the bug-tracker software for Perl 5 core). We hope to have the archive out for general viewing very soon and will be under the rather nifty address of all.things.per.ly – so stay tuned for more information.

[Recursive Photo taking - ahh infinity loop]

[NWE.PM co-leader IDN hacks at it]

[Pizza time - YAY!]

So to all those who turned up on the day, worked hard, continue to work hard and have made the last twelve months, and our inaugural year a great sucess I say thank-you. I hope to see you all in the new year and look forward to drinking, coding and socialising with you.

-ttfn – Mark