So the hustings are over and the bunting has been pulled down and we close the books, looks and sack the cooks as we say farewell to another London Perl Workshop for another year. But what a great year it has been.

Thanks for the memories

So as the organiser and I am privileged (and not just duty bound) to once again offer the thanks and express the gratitude to all the people who made the London Perl Workshop the great event it was once again this year.

(Some of the paraphernalia that is created for the conference)

Firstly to all the speakers for taking the time, effort, money and sometime abuse to come and present a range of world-class talks that were eagerly anticipated and gratefully received. Year after year I see new faces and returning friends and I am always surprised by the breadth of topic and depth of knowledge of our presenters.

So to our sponsors I say hoorah you wonderful people, you gave us gifts to hand out, prizes to award, beer and food to sate our lusts and most importantly a venue in which to house and contain us. A special thanks once again to Sean Tohill of the University of Westminster, Martin Brooks at Antibody, Matthew at :Bytemark, James and Amit at Venda, Ed from Nestoria, the people of Shadowcat Systems and the wonderful Dave Cross from Magnum Solutions. You people all rock.

(The Sponsored part of the bar bill, all 1.5 metres of it)

To Dave Cross, Matthew Trout and Ash Berlin I would like to give my special thanks for once again presenting a great pair of workshops. It isn’t enough for you people to present and attend you also take the time and energy to add something more and enhance our community.

To all the people who helped behind the scenes, which includes those who brought camera equipment, picked up boxes, and the great response from the audience to help clean after the event. My heartfelt thanks. But, to my wife, who sat and registered people all day, missed the conference and yet still remained happy and positive to all who approached her I give the biggest hug (this is not an open invitation to all to do the same in a physical sense).

Finally to the audience who came along, many of them new to LPW and to Perl conferences as a whole. Thanks for joining in, I look forward to seeing you at similar events and hopefully LPW next year.

Some Stats

190 People registered from 16 countries and 25 monger groups – which is 9 more than last year. We estimate that approximately 165-185 turned up on the day and we had around a dozen students from the university 8 of whom signed in after registration.

There was 3.5 hours of workshops given by three speakers. In total 38 talks lasting 16 hours were presented – only 2 talks couldn’t be given by their original authors and replacement speakers/presentations were found for them. A total of 8 lightning talks were presented.

-ttfn – Mark

More about the workshop

This will be a short post this week as I am wrapped up in a number of busy things and have to be brief so I can get back to them. If I get time I will do a second post later in the week. The schedule for the London Perl Workshop:

London Perl Workshop Schedule

Is now up, a large number of speakers have confirmed their acceptance (shown in slightly bold font). There are three presentation tracks and a Workshop track with a total of approximately 16hrs of quality discussion of all things Perl.

Hack-tastic Gromit

Last Saturday we had a mini-hackathon for the Core Bug Trackers project at the Shadowcat offices attended by Matt S, Trout, Tom Doran, Mark keating, Ian Norton and Leigh Keating (though Mark hacked the LPW schedule and Leigh hacked her Nanowrimo novel). It was quite a sucess and I decided to post a couple of pictures from the event. Shadowcat will be hosting a 12hr write-a-thon this month and another hackathon for nwe.pm (North West England Perl Mongers) next month. All are invited to come along and hack with us on the 12th December if you can make it to Lancaster (there may be beer and pizza in iut ).

Everybody looks fascinated for the camera.

It was about 9 p.m. in the evening when we decided it might be best to take the pens away from Ian

-ttfn – Mark

My Ironman Status

We happy few…

I am going to follow up my article from last week, Pushing the Envelope, with an article cunningly titled Pushing the Envelope: part two (I was going to try something witty such as The Compiler Strikes Back but not only did it not fit the subject matter but it was also not funny). Last week I asked people to sign up to write Perl Articles that we could initially (hopefully) get published on The Register and that we could then further use. This week I will follow up the piece by explaining the conditions laid down by The Register and some of my thoughts for what else we do with the articles.

I’d like to begin, though, by thanking those people who have already signed up. We are about one third of the minimum number I said we need to do this without pressurising people too much and that was half-way to my golden figure. I want to extend my great respect of those who have already jumped at the chance and urge everyone else to read the call at the bottom of this blog and jump also

El Reg…

The Register has made only three stipulations and I think we can achieve these three with ease and it also allows us some opportunities for further usage.

1.Reg would get first-publication rights on such articles, but the articles could subsequently be republished elsewhere
So we could try to get these articles published by other online agents afterwards, or expand on them and reprint in offline magazines, place on Perl related websites, collect into a series of articles and self-published on LuLu (or whomever). The idea is that once we have the articles we can place them under a CC licence (making sure the author’s copyrights are retained) and use them wherever we can to get maximum use and exposure and further push the envelope.

2.The Reg would not expect to pay any freelance fees
This is par for the course, as mentioned above it may be possible to expand the articles and make some revenue from publishing elsewhere but this exercise is in getting Perl to a wider audience not in making money, personally I will buy a beer for any of the contributors, and will find people to buy you beers if I can.

3. Producing work in a timely fashion. The current expectation is for there to be one article per week. Our first step is to supply an initial article. Assuming all goes well with that, we can set up a schedule for subsequent articles.
An article a week sounds like a high expectation, but I don’t believe so. As I mentioned in my article last week. If we try to get at least two people working on each article and have over 50 contrib’s, that is two articles a year you will work on, but really only write either two halves, or write one and edit one.

But, what we still really need is…

(MORE) VOLUNTEERS

Stop thinking that you couldn’t do a task like this. You can. You will not be alone. You will be at least one of a pair, in a working group of maybe six or eight and part of a wider group who can help you. And you will be helping the community in a huge way. If there are people who want to write articles on their own, that is also cool, we will work with peer review and editing in the same manner. All contributiuons will be useful. I will also need people to help me control who is writing what, where and when. Controlling submissions and tools for co-operative collaboration – so you people who think you can do that should also be raising your hands.

So sign up now. Or else I will find you…

Please email Mark Keating at:

m(dot)keating(at)suppliers.shadowcatsystems.co.uk

Thanks

This week I will be attending the Italian Perl Workshop and I hope that you’ll catch me there and say hello, you may offer me a towel or a hug I will probably accept either, or simply wave this will also suffice.

My Ironman Status

While in Lisbon at YAPC::EU::2009 I was fortunate enough to talk to Aaron who is an avid Perler and member of the Edinburgh Perl Mongers. Without going into too much detail it is enough to say that Aaron is a member of the Reg team and we had a discussion about pushing the Perl envelope. Specifically how to get Perl back into the consciousness of the wider world. What we decided was to try and get regular articles about Perl out into the world. We decided to start with the Reg as Aaron felt sure he could get a positive response.

Well he went away and he did get a good response. If we can produce the articles the Register may print them, but we will need to keep up a steady flow, about one a week.

Now we have to fulfill the other part.

The Numbers

Here’s the basic upshot. I need authors. A lot of them, the reason I need a lot is to cut down the strain and I’ll explain why. Aaron and I have managed to get the opportunity for a weekly article on a Perl subject to be printed on the Reg. If 4 people take on this task they will each have to write at least 13 articles in a year, if it is 8 the figure halves and so on. So I want 52 people, minimum

If we have 52 authors we can pair up on articles, two authors working with each other to write/edit their work and get an article turned around in good speed. So we would have 2 articles a year each and the possibility of editing another 2 – and I’ll cover that in a minute as we think of peer editing and article groups.

Of course if we have 104 people or more it becomes 1 a year and the task gets so much easier for all.

Editing and Themes

The idea of writing the articles is that they would be short pieces. Maybe 500 – 3,000 words in each maximum and I think it would be good if we set ourselves themes to cover. These themes would be things such as:

Begining Perl - articles on how to get started in Perl

Windows Perl - articles on setting up and running Perl on Windows

Projects - a series of articles introducing some of the bigger projects – Moose/Catalyst/Padre/Raduko/Mojo/Dbic etc. – with the idea that we can introduce and explain how to use these projects

Using Perl – companion articles to the begining/using Perl with the idea of using specific projectsd to achieve aims

Modern Perl

Enlightened Perl

There are obviously others but this is a start.

We would assign groups of people to one ‘theme’. So if we had four articles on Moose Roles we would attempt to assign 8 people. This working group would be responsible for writing/editing the 4 articles between them (hopefully drawing on their respective different strengths) and thereby reducing the stress even further from one pair.

These are my initial thoughts.

I will be returning to this theme in my next post when I want to talk about the conditions the Reg requires and what we do with the articles once we have them published/written and in one place.

What I really need is…

VOLUNTEERS

Stop thinking that you couldn’t do a task like this. You can. You will not be alone. You will be at least one of a pair, in a working group of maybe six or eight and part of a wider group who can help you. And you will be helping the community in a huge way. If there are people who want to write articles on their own, that is also cool, we will work with peer review and editing in the same manner. All contributiuons will be useful. I will also need people to help me control who is writing what, where and when. Controlling submissions and tools for co-operative collaboration – so you people who think you can do that should also be raising your hands.

So sign up now. Or else I will find you…

Please email Mark Keating at:

m(dot)keating(at)suppliers.shadowcatsystems.co.uk

Thanks

My Ironman Status

Welcome ye one and all to a chance in a lifetime, well an almost chance in a lifetime, especially if you do not know the authors of the Catalyst book, or have only heard about either them, the book, or Perl, or are just curious, or have been living in a tree somewhere, or chanced across this blog, or are one of my many spammers, or are someone who wishes I would stop using or as it is unnecessary, you might be an oar…wow, that was quick I lost my thread in the first paragraph again…

Step back. Take deep breaths. Remove the lighted blue touch paper from head.

On Wednesdasy 28th October 2009 the North West England Perl Mongers group will be holding a technical meeting in Manchester at the MEN Offices. The focus of this meeting will be Writing Documents and then a live web link-up with KD (Kieren Diment) in Australia and MST (Matt S. Trout), Castaway (Jess Robinson) in England, three of the authors of the Definitive Guide to Catalyst book who will be available for questioning.

Even more fun ensues, and the possibility of failure, as we will be trying to do a live web-cast of the event so that others can watch the proceedings over t’internet (something has to go pop here, I know it, two time zones and three different pieces of tech – meh, we’re all techies we don’t need help in screwing this up ).

So, I invite one-and-all to send me some questions in advance of the event. I will also be trying to use a Twitter Feed (more tech to fail) and possibly Facebook/IRC at the same time. But pre-sent questions will go first. If we fail at the tech we have fall over situations.

Failure to web-cast – we simply put up the video afterwards.
Failure to link to KD – we still have MST and Castaway

Whatever the outcome we should be able to quiz these guys so you in the Perlverse/Tech-World need to get us your questions so that we can do that.

Either use the comments form on this blog or email Mark Keating at:

nwe-questions(at)suppliers.shadowcatsystems.co.uk

Thanks

My Ironman Status

Okay now the second half of that opening statement was a awful, awful pun but I refuse to be apologetic.

So in a short post aimed at eliciting a response I am posing a couple of questions at my fellow bloggers assembled.

Question One: Should we have an archive of articles?

I like the Ironman challenge and sometimes I also like searching back through the week to see if there are articles I have missed or want to link to people, but I am also now thinking that I would like a general archive – with perhaps a searchable status. This is because I am lazy, because I want to have one location to search the blogs on this challenge etc., but mostly because I am lazy.
What do you think?
Can we use it to drive more traffic to places Perl?

Question Two: The notion of a T-shirt

I have been thinking of putting a t-shirt design on CafePress and Spreadshirt for people in the challenge to purchase. I am further thinking that I should make it -at cost- so the only profit being made is by the printing company. Should I:

A. Put up t-shirt designs for people to buy?
B. Place them at cost?
C: Put a small charge onto them and donate the profits to the EPO or similar?

Let me know your thoughts people If I were to make a profit I would not only state what profit EPO gets from the sale of each t-shirt but would publish sales figures and sponsorship data.

My Ironman Status

Some of you reading this blog will know that it is part of the Ironman Blogging challenge which is supported by the Enlightened Perl Organisation.

What you may or may not know is that I am currently in charge of creating the graphics for that competition. I created the badges – soon to be next to all competitors and I have now created a couple of banners that you are free to use on any site you so wish with the appropriate links.

Link to: http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/signup/new_feed

Link to: http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org

Either right click and save the image or drag and drop. If you need an absolute link to the image to use a linked image on a site then use:

http://enlightenedperl.org/images/ironsignup.png (top banner)

http://enlightenedperl.org/images/ppi01-banner.png (bottom banner)

Take. Enjoy. Use. Have fun.

I am going to begin this post by thanking Gabor Szabo for his recent blog post What I am missing from EPO, and to state that this is to follow up on his comments and queries and hopefully clarify some things. It is not intended to refute, rebuke or denigrate his words in any manner. In fact my feeling is that it is good to have people examine the motives and directions of any cause or process especially if they are outside or new as it gives analytical objectivity. As Gabor stated on IRC he wants to help us avoid making mistakes or at least aid us in spotting those mistakes.

Inside the offices of Circumlocution…

So without any further ado I am going to try and answer Gabor’s points to the best of my ability, explaining the current situation and my thoughts on progression. I hope that people see this as a dialogue as opposed to a monologue and that we all avoid the circulatory  bike-shedding that is so resplendent in these situations and find a clear path.**

A list apart from this one…

“I looked at the web site and could not find an e-mail list to see what’s going on.”

That’s a bloody good point, we need links to the existing Mailing Lists on the site (note taken, will add links) – they are at http://lists.scsys.co.uk. There is no general list at present but I think it is a good idea to have one and I will try to organise setting one up. There are dedicated lists, on the Extended Core run by Perigrin, the Marketing list etc., and we accept any input that we can. If you wish to mail the entire membership before we get that list up simply mail the Secretary (me) and I will pass on your email to the entire membership with a mail out to their addresses, but I would hope we try to get a voluntary list or use IRC as that feels like spamming, especially if it is for trivial things .

Who. Where. When. The three standards of journalism

“I tried to understand how many members they have”

Currently there are 25 Ordinary members and 25 Special members in the organisation. We are trying to recruit more.

“how much money they have”

Not a huge amount but as a member you are allowed a complete list of what money we have and where it came from. Please grab me privately for that information and I will supply it. For legal reasons we cannot publish any accounts online until after they have been submitted to Companies House. Our first year accounts are due and will be submitted soon at which point a report and viewing them will be available at companieshouse.gov.uk.

“and on what did they spend it so far?”

Thus far the only money we have spent has been on sponsoring the LPW last year AFAIR. The directors are not going for nightly beer festivals, in fact no fees have been paid to any members we do everything in our own time to try and push this forward.

“Are there any plans on how to spend the rest of the money?”

There are plans. Currently we have the three grants that are available and I am soon to put forward a proposal we have had for re-designing of some Perl sites which you will see as a member.

But why these?!!! And not this?!!! Also that…

“For a long time I did not know what projects are they involved. It is still not clear to me what does this involvement mean or what do they plan as involvement?
Actually I was personally surprised they have not included Padre or at least the idea of a Perl development envrionment in the list of what they think is important for modern perl development.”

The projects were originally chosen as they were close to the ideals of what we are calling Enlightened Perl. The projects in EC are those used by professionals in real world environments and talk to Perigrin/mst et al for more on that. As for why Padre wasn’t included – I have no idea. You would have to have that discussion in channel and with the other members. I feel certain that you would get a response. If of course you want it included in the projects then simply ask for a vote (as any Ordinary Member can) and I will put it to the membership to discuss and vote on.
As for the support. As you can see from the first round of grants part of our aim is to try and get more documents and articles written about the projects we think fall under the Enlightened banner. Padre, if it were included, would get the same focus.

(Also, I work with mst, I thought that Perl was the IDE!).

How much does it cost to convince you?

“I met mst in Oslo in the Nordic Perl Workshop where he explained a bit about EPO, but his explanation you can join EPO and suggest anyting was not really convincing.”

Strangely though, you can join EPO and suggest anything. As I mentioned above if you need something mentioned to the whole membership let me know. I will try to help or suggest as best I can. But don’t expect me to act on every word spoken in a channel somewhere. I can only fully act if you talk directly to me, I am your organisation secretary and my email address is on the orgs website, mail me and we’ll take it from there. I prefer email for any thing I am needed to act on as then I have a record that I can easily print if necessary for records or audits.
The process is usually that I will mention it to the Directors first and if necessary they will vote on it or decide to open it to the entire membership.

“I hope I’ll be able to influence the above issues and make EPO and organization that many others will feel good to join.”

As I said at the start of this post, thanks for making the statement. It is necessary to give voice to concerns as that way we can see them and hopefully avoid problems, mistakes and overcome difficulties.

I can see clearly now…

On the subject of transparency. I mentioned that the UK has some pretty odd (in the manner that they are vaguely worded) privacy laws, especially in regards to the display and retention of electronic details and their usage. I personally would like to see a members-only section of the website, where an EPO member can log in and see other members, see their names and contact details and even find lists and projects and collaborate in an environment that is fully transparent to the membership and open as much as possible to the casual observer without breaching anyone’s rights. I also would like to place a list visible to the world of which members are doing what inside the organisation (listed without their personal details) and that is easily achievable just time consuming.
If anyone would like to help me in organising and making the data available and building the membership only area where I can put sensitive reports and yet enable us to be as open as we can to everyone then please get in touch. Honestly, I do not have the technical skill and I really do not have the time to do everything. But I am happy to work with and organise people who volunteer.

* Yes my apologies to Jonathan Swift, I have neither his wit or his wisdom.

** Passionately purple prose anyone? Perhaps I could add that we should restrict our verbiage to a minimum display of syllabic expansion while still containing enough participatory exuberance as to engage and enlighten the reader.

Which means Perl is Alive and Well and most certainly Kicking

(As per my Ironman Challenge condition, this is a re-post from my SC Blog)

There is always a good mood at a YAPC, I am not sure what the exact mix is that creates it but it is there, it pervades the schedule and penetrates the attendees bringing them to an almost pleasant little euphoric state. This is especially true of a YAPC::EU and the conference organisers of this year’s event did all that they could to encourage this sensation.

This does not imply that there is no seriousness. That would be insulting. The organisers put a great deal of effort in to ensuring that the event and the surrounding socialisation runs smoothly; the sponsors push out the boat to encourage and promote a community they seem to care so deeply for; the speakers yet again seek to not only enlighten but to entertain and endear, always surpassing expectation with the quality of what they present. All of this contributes toward that sense of worthiness you feel when you attend. You know the effort of attending, of arranging a perhaps busy schedule is paid off by the quality of treatment and experience you are given.

But there is more to it than that…

There are the people, which is you if you attended, or you if you go next time, or you the reader who can imagine the experience we all shared. The people who attend are the element that makes a YAPC special, and they do it in so many ways. I am going to focus on two experiences that are close to my heart and really made my YAPC. The first was a challenge and the second a much-appreciated return…

The Challenge

It is no secret that the Shadowcat Technical Director likes to use profanities to punctuate both his speech and his writing. A long-term devotee to good English he nevertheless uses profanity to add emphasis and direction, also to my mind he uses it to influence people to highpoints or significant issues in his argument almost embolding what follows the profanity. He also uses it, in my interpretation, as a technique to imply derision or reductify position of argument he calls question with. Added to this he is one of the last of the good-time drinkers and is used to colloquial, somewhat laddish, northern-beer-man-swillish behaviour and conversation patterns.

There has been some fun had for a few years by attendees to his talks to either guess what emphatic use he will give to profanities or to count the number of times he gives them. In jest I have produced a t-shirt which has the message, “play the Matt S. Trout drinking game, every time he swears you take a drink. See how many sentences you survive.”. Now let us have as an understanding that I have always believed that Matt uses profanity in the manner he uses any other word he utters, writes or presents. It is a tool to convey meaning and his point. Whether it is in a comfortable laid-back manner or with gusto and zest to entertain his audience.

This year though he was presented with a challenge by Jesse of Best Practical, to deliver all three of his talks without profanity. He could still use the original slides, which had some profane words on them and had been used in these presentations previously (the title of the Lightning talk was “Rum, Buggery and the Lash”), but he could not utter profanities.

The winning of the bet was a night of drinking to be paid for by Jesse.

Matt had to control his natural enthusiasm for profanity used as emphasis and watch carefully his use of words as he presented in case he slipped and delivered it in a previous manner. It was an excellent challenge that Matt won (which I had little doubt of as I stated in my understanding of his usage above). But, it also added an extra dimension of fun to the proceedings and I think to the entire conference as was proved by the dedication in the Catalyst book that was auctioned and the first paragraph that was also auctioned to be read out to the gathered masses.

The video of these talks is available on the shadowcat website in the Conference videos section, and if you wish to compare and contrast them, simply load the Pittsburgh versions and match the diffence in words.

The Return

Many people in the Perl community know that Piers Cawley has been away for some time having fun with the Ruby language. Others will know that he has returned to Perl and this year he presented at the YAPC his reasons for returning to Perl.

His talk was one of the best at the conference being not only well delivered and well structured but also had a great introduction by Damien Conway who managed to get a good joke about introductions being “short and boring” as well as playing with the other element of Piers’s talk MooseX (moo sex). Piers has graciously allowed me to put his video on the Shadowcat site as Matt and I did a small favour for him for the talk and I think it is worthy of as much promotion as possible.

The other element Piers brought to the YAPC is his great enthusiasm and his ability to accurately tease as was proven in his lightning talk where he sang his ‘revised’ version of a folk song which played with the notion of profanity and mocked both Perl people and other IT communities in a gentle and yet well-targetted manner, a rather excellent slice of satirical mockery.

Due to issues with recording (and not wishing to breach the authors original copyright and rights) I do not have the video to show, I only wish I had as Piers skilfully managed to tempt a room full of techies to sing along with him, I can however give you some of the words Piers sang (I do have the complete words available and will give them out if asked):

1.
Oh the pirates in their fetid galleons
Daggers in their skivvies(?)
With infested tattoes fingers
Wrapped around a blunderbuss or two
Signs of skurvy in their eyes
And with murder on their minds
It is from them I expect to hear the f-word not from you

[Chorus]
We sit down to have a chat
It’s f-word this
And f-word that
I can’t control how you Perl people talk to one another
But I don’t like to hear you use that f-word with your mother

4.
There are Rubyists
whose arrogance make Mister T look humble
Who because they’ve got a porno slide
Are way more cool than you
With their thirty-seven signals and domain-specific language
It is from them I expect to hear the f-word not from you

[Chorus]
We sit down to have a chat
It’s f-word this
And f-word that
I can’t control how you Perl people talk to one another
But I don’t like to hear you use that f-word with your mother

6.
There are hackers in utilikilts
With hair down to their backside
Who will tell you that the future’s
All about Enlightened Moose
With their Catalytic Dbix::Class
And tendency to hubris
It is from them I expect to hear that f-word not from you
[Last chance to join in everyone]

[Chorus]
We sit down to have a chat
It’s f-word this
And f-word that
I can’t control how Matt S. Trout will talk to everyone
But I don’t like to hear him use that f-word with his mother

The original of this song is “A Chat with Your Mom” by Lou and Peter Berryman

This is the spirit people bring to the YAPC, and there were many more people showing the same spirit, these were just two examples and they had a related theme I used them both. In a future article I will be returning to this issue as I will talk more on the spirit of Perl people, perhaps returning to some of the events in and around this years YAPC::EU.

I have recently been persuaded by Matt S. Trout to join in with his Ironman competition and become an Iron Monger in the name of all things Perlish.
So here I am…
And now I am a Paper-Man (or Paper Person) and have this little badge to prove it:

(and so would everyone else if Matt had the Iron Munger code working but being the designer of these badges I have access to them)

But since I am here I should make a few notes. Firstly this is not the only blog I post to, this is my blog for the Perl world and its associated communities that I belong to. As the Managing Director of Shadowcat Systems I maintain a blog on the Shadowcat site and I consider that company blog to be eligible for Ironman as well as this one. I also have a blog at projectmonkey.vox.com which is a general set of writings that are not directly connected to work or the world of Perl I move in, but may occasionally have Perl related things.

So I did have an issue of which blog to link to the Ironman event…and then Matt solved it with his usual ease, there was either the idea of doing an aggregated site and using a feed to that (which neither of us really liked) or the method I will be employing which is to simply repeat any Ironman related posts from my Shadowcat Blog on this site so they are picked up by the Ironman EPO Planet.

So that about wraps this up for my very first post to be hopefully pulled by the Planet. I should note that if you want to join this wonderful competition there is now an online form so use it .