Category — North West England Perl Mongers

Day One of the YAPC Europe Conference in Lisbon has been interesting for me and for the Enlightened Perl Organisation.
First off we are going to be approached by Edmund to take over the organisational aspects of the Send-a-Newbie program.
Secondly Ovid asked me to come along to the BOFF on Marketting Perl.
Thirdly I got a great idea for the Italian YAPC::EU::2010 organisers that I may have to grab them for But more on that if it happens.
The end of the day saw the next big thing for me as Leon sort-of, rather easily, persuaded me to organise the LPW once again – as usual lots of help has already been offered by Leon, Dave Cross et al., and we have a theme that I will be announcing sometime soon…
That’s it for day one – must hide during day two.

Oh some pictures to close with:

Niles eyes up the competition

Niles and Amelia

Leon and Edmund

Yuval tries out a new hat

Busy hackers

Conference Crowd

This year's organisers

Leigh models this years YAPC t-shirt from Shadowcat

Pre-conference meeting

Larry at the pre-conference meet

So the time rolled around again and the now gaggle of Perlers in the North West of England did meet to consume beer and talk about things, oft Camel, somewhat Penguin (who was sadly absent) and mostly YNK and this time Doctor Who, System Admin tales of yore and many topics in-between of a geekish/nerdish/churlish nature and not at all centred around Perl or computers.
It was a very good social .
The Ship and Mitre is a grand pub to hold a social in as its wide variety of liquors and frequently held beer festivals allow one to succumb (succumbage perhaps) to intimate vices with fermented vegetable products, and submit to its minx-like charms we all did.
At the same time something substantive also happened as my fellow cohort and I in the capacity of leadership and somewhat guidance did knock crowns together and fix upon some shape for meetings to come, so in a grand Wellsian tradition I shall now lay out our thoughts (with of course suitable apologies to those whom I am inviting to participate in the next half year who have not fully been informed of this separately but to whom we have discussed somewhat of ideas):

“The Shape of Things to Come”

2nd September
August Technical (yes I realise the disparity of the month) to be held in Lancaster, hopefully at Lancaster University, and to discuss matters pertaining to GSoC and building Perl in the educational community.

30th September
September social (held within the right month ), this should be held in the wonderful wee town of Warrington.

28th October
October technical, hopefully this will be held at the wonderful MEN offices in Manchester and may feature a talk by Jess (Castaway) on documenting Perl projects and we are hoping if Jess is about and we can arrange the technical fiddly bits to have a live sync’d conference with KD in Australia and Matt S. Trout where these three can take a live Q&A session and discuss their recent Catalyst book.

25th November
Social for Novemeber, and to continue a newish trend, we will hopefully be holding the social in Manchester but may change venues if there is a decent suggestion from our Manchester contingent – perhaps we could go for food first?

12th-13th December
For our December technical we are firstly meeting early and secondly attempting a 1-2 day hackathon at the Shadowcat Systems offices in Lancaster. There will be more details about this hackathon and other events on the nwe.pm website as we get them

No doubts there will be more in one month + 2 days for the August Technical.

North West England Perl Mongers Third Technical Meeting
Manchester Evening News Offices 1st July 2009

The third technical meeting that was held last night at the MEN was to me a great experience and its success relied on the hard work of a few dedicated people. So I am going to start by listing them in an honour roll:

Manchester Evening News – for allowing us to use their excellent facilities;
Nick Evans – Web Development Team Manager for getting this approved and his warm welcome;
Graeme Lawton and Iain Hubbard – for arranging the event with their employers;
Barbie, JJ (both from birmingham,pm), mst, osfameron, mdk, idn and fade for presenting at the event;

Ian Norton, nwe.pm co-leader having fun presenting

The format for the evening was Lightning talks. This is a great format to use, especially for people who are unsure of talking or haven’t presented much before. It is also good for practicing timing and for mixing a greater range of technical presentations into a single evening.

The talks were all quite diverse and all of them were interesting to me, though I can’t say that I followed all of them which is why I am glad they were videoed and will be on the nwe.pm website in the near future. My favourites have to be Osfameron talking about the Italian Perl Workshop, Barbie’s enlightening talk about Cpan and MST’s ramble on why Perl is his language of choice – a talk he had to prepare on the night from audience suggestion. The next time we do this I am going to open up the suggestions to a wider audience beforehand and then vote on the funkiest ones on the night.

As usual we retired to a nearby hostelry for some liquid refreshment and a chance to catch up on people’s personal lives. I was particularly glad to see a couple of new faces at the technical meeting and I am hoping we will see them at future events.

nwe.pm Sharing a casual pintage at a local pub

The current word on the street is that we will be holding the next meeting at the end of July in Liverpool. This will be a social event and as always we will be opening it up to any with a technical bent. We may be Perlers but we like to mix in the greater social world, it would be good to get a couple of Ruby/Python/PhPers in a meeting so we can have a good chat about the way we use our varying languages and the IT life in general.

One last thing, Niles the Enlightened Perl Camel had his first night out with Perlers and was last seen head down in a beer glass…

Niles, the Enlightened Perl Camel, steals Pingu's thunder