Category — London Perl Workshop

A very modest[1] man in need of praise

Last week the very well-known and indominable force of nature that is Dave Cross was kind enough to mention Matt and I in a list of people in his article The Without Whoms, who had done good work in 2009 for the Perl community. Specifically he mentioned the work we did on the Ironman blogging competition. I found this strangely humbling as I have a great deal of respect for Dave Cross and so in return I will try to capture a little of the impact of this man.

Dave is the founder of the London Perl Monguers and has been a principal force in both the bringing into being of the YAPC Europe conferences and the London Perl Workshop. He has spoken as the Keynote speakers at both 2008 and 2009, he has also presented free workshops at conferences to encourage new, or greater, participation in the community.

Aside from running a vast number of projects to be found on CPAN and on his Github Page Dave maintains a number of Blogs. These are: Perl Hacks; davblog; as well as administering: Blogs at Perl.org; and tweeting happily here: Davorg on Twitter where he is possibly the greatest human being ever to hold the title Davorg; slicdes from his conference presentations are updated to Slideshare for all to view.

More information on Dave can always be found on Dave’s personal website, which is kept up-to-date (and I swear he must have a team of immigrant children working in a sweat shop somewhere to track all that he does and update all this).

Professionally Dave is well respected for his training courses that have been run at many conferences and workshops with O’Reilly, UKUUG, YAPC and others all desiring his services. His company website Magnum Solutions has a full list of details about these.

There is still more that can be said about Dave Cross. He is constantly supportative of the local community around him as is shown by the number of Planet sites he has built, or is involved with:

The Planetarium;
Planet Balham;
Balham Twits;
SW12 Org;
Planet Westminster;
The Political Web;

This list doesn’t include the fact that Dave is always on hand on varioius IRC channels, or in person at community events to give advice, offer help and support and generally be an all-round excellent
person[2].

This list is not exhaustive or complete, and any errors or omissions are mine and i would be glad to correct them. Please send me an email to add a comment to this list about Dave.

[1] Dave may or may not be modest, I only believe so from personal experience and the fact that he didn’t do anywhere near enough blowing of his own trumpet in his article.

[2] He makes all the girls and boys moist with anticipation.

-ttfn – Mark

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

Even more workshop details

So an even shorter post this week as I am in final preparation for the London Perl Workshop which is being held this Saturday at the University of Westminster’s Cavendish Campus (see my previous posts for more information).

We have a good schedule of events listed and we are now discussing the possibility of recording as much of the conference as we possibly can. So if you are unable to attend this year keep your eyes glued to this blog as i will announce when and where the footage will be going up.

For now I am going back to fussing over a few minor details of registration cards etc.

-ttfn – Mark

Even more workshop details

All about food

Due to the very generous nature of our sponsors this year’s London Perl Workshop will have a wonderful buffet in the evening. This should make previous year’s simple fare pale into the background as a veritable cornucopia of delights are paraded for hungry workshoppers to feast upon. Coupled with the almost obligatory free ales, as also supplied by our sponsors, should see us well catered for in almost every regard.

There will be prizes…

Once again the wonderful chaps from Nestoria will be awarding prizes on the day for the ‘Best Of’ workshop events. If you were with us last year you will recall that these will most likely be some quality book or other grand item. Prizes will be awarded after the lightning talks are finished.

And free goodies

But fear not if you do not get a prize as there will be a raft of free goodies at this year’s event. Once again we have managed to procure fun items for you to take home as keepsakes, though there is one small catch….

For 140 of those that register

The conference bags of goodies will be limited to the first 140 people who attend and are signed up beforehand to the event. There will be a spare few items over that number that will be free for all to take, but the pre-made bags are restricted to signed-up people only.

In the evening…

Don’t forget to register on the wiki for the evening so we can judge numbers please. Also, in order to prevent random people wandering into the pub and taking drinks/food, we may have to evict people who do not have an official workshop badge (not Perl people of course but Lardy London Layabouts), so do please sign up.

That wraps it up for now. The Schedule is now online and fixed so sign up to your favourite talks. London Perl Workshop Schedule

Don’t forget to buy a t-shirt soon as they take 4-6 days to deliver (business days) and I look forward to seeing you all in London on the 3rd or the 5th.

-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

The Event

The London Perl Workshop, which I am sure you have all heard about and are even now wondering how to get to this magnificent event, is a free event that will be held on 5th December 2009 at the University of Westminster’s Cavendish Square Campus.

London Perl Workshop Homepage

I thought I would start to post about this, since I am the organiser, and let the world know the things that are on the mailing lists – in case you missed them. The theme for this year’s event is Begining Perl. There will be two training workshops run at the same time as the conference and these will be free as well and offerred by the well-known and respected Dave Cross and Matthew Trout.

Call for Papers

We are on the last day of the Call for Papers and you have until midnight tonight to submit to this. After this time you are scupperred matey. If you have an idea I reccommend you write a brief abstract and get it posted, you can always update later:

Submit a talk proposal link

T-Shirts

The London Perl Workshop has always been, and probably will always be, a free workshop event. For this reason we have never traditionally prepared or offerred t-shirts. But that was then and this is now. Thanks to the wonders of internet ordering you can now get a t-shirt for the Workshop from Spreadshirt in a wide variety of colours and styles and with two different logos.

t-shirt buying page

If you cannot make it to the event itself you can still buy a t-shirt and be a part of this great occasion.

Beer in the Evening

The LPW is a free occassion, and in the world of open source that usually means: “free as in speech but not as in beer”. Well we say “nonsense old bean” and “piff take your fancy” to such crudeities. The London Perl Workshop will have a social event after the main event and this will have a free beer and a buffet as generously provided by our sponsors. I encourage those attending the conference to sign up to this event:

Wiki page for the evening beers

If you are at the event and not wearing a conference badge we will have a large pack of slavering programmers waiting to chew on your grisly bits, at least one of the reknowned ‘Daves’ has promised not to eat for a week to clear his system for something meaty.

That’s the round up for this blog post. I will post more soon about the sponsors/talks and details on the training workshops.

-ttfn – Mark