byterock

Well we started out today with a key-note (if a workshop has a keynote??) talk by Brian d Foy, you can see the slides here, and from the first few you will think it is just a blurb on regexs etc but fortunately Brian quickly left that rather overdone (and in my case dreaded) subject on how we can build up the Perl community. What it breaks down to is that you will never gain any notoriety out there re-doing what was already done you have to take on something that is either 'Boring', 'Tedious', or 'Hard' and hopefully stick with it until it is done.

The Talk as a whole was interesting and Brian did a very good job
on what needs to be done to fill the whitespace of Perl and if we do fill it up the community will be better of it.

Lee Johnson gave the next talk and he introduced us on how mojolicious is being leveraged by his compnay to swap over from an older non-maintinable CGI design to a more programmer friendly Mojo-app.

Tobias Oetiker also gave us an intorduction to a new framework he is creating that makes building front edns for service appliances much easier. This again using Mojo and a JS library, that is a new one on me, called a 'qooxdoo' will have to have a look at that one later.

Paul Johnson was up next and he gave us an interesting talk on how he is using the Docker to create VMs to run his ongoing ' Devel::Cover' run. Some really neat stuff but most flew way over my head as this level of testing was and is, to my shame, something I try to avoid.

Mike Friedman gave the next talk and it was a cut down version of Building Your First App with MongoDB and Perl tutorial. A very good introduction and he does give some very good pointers on what Mongo is and isn't and why you should use it.

Brain came around a second time with a talk on what he calls 'Modulinos' a module the works both as a script (.pl) or a .pm. Some nice tricks but jetlag was getting the better of me and so I was unable to pay as much heed as I should of. The general impression I had was that what he was showing could be called 'Disruptive tech' as he really was bending a number or rules, I wonder what Damian Conway would have to say about it??

Laurent Dami gave us a good peek at some new code he has been working on that lets you create virtural tables in SQLlite without having to be an 'C' or XS guru. So far things are limited to three types of table but this promises to be a real keeper as it will make searching full text documents much easier and think faster

Finally Liz gave her usual plea for someone to use and or save Perl6 it seems it in now much better and is not going to that great scrap heap of dead languages in the sky. Hey there is ever a windows version for it so maybe I should give it a try.

Finally we had a few impromptu lighting talks and then it was off to a s spegittie dinner the the KOC would be proud of.