I love teaching in Zurich. I enjoy the city itself, of course, but the real attractions are the remarkable people who come along to the classes there. They're invariably smart, motivated, humorous, practical, and challenging: a joy to teach.
For that reason alone, over the past few years almost every new class I have created has debuted in Zurich. And this year is no different...
Something I'm asked quite often is: "If you were rewriting Perl Best Practices today, what would you change?" Apart from the obvious answer1, over the past six months I've been seriously pondering that question. In fact, I reread every suggestion in the book, rethinking them all in light of the intervening decade: the many improvements in Perl, the vast expansion of CPAN, the considerable debate and feedback I've received on the book itself, as well as my own evolution as a programmer and as a teacher of programmers.
Somewhat to my own surprise, about 80% of the original advice seems to hold up2. But about 50 of the original guidelines were in obvious need of updating...or, in a few cases, of taking off and nuking them from orbit. And, not surprisingly, quite a few techniques, practices, and tools that today we take for granted in modern Perl development are entirely missing from the book.
Putting all those observations together, I've developed an completely new one-day class: Perl Even Better Practices, which I'm offering for the very first time in Zurich next month.
The other new class I'm offering there is my two-day Perl Programming Masterclass. It's the most advanced programming class I've ever taught, bringing together a lot of hard-to-find information about how Perl really works, and then demonstrating how to combine the best of Perl's high-end features to create much more powerful and maintainable code much more quickly.
The class delves deeply into the fundamental programming "power tools": scope, context, namespaces, lexicality, referencing, aliasing, autovivification, closures, flow-of-control, inversion-of-control, higher-order functions, abstraction, delegation, and decoupling. It doesn't just explain what those CS buzzwords mean, but shows how to apply them to the everyday problems of coding: designing and implementing procedural and OO systems, building effective data structures, manipulating them efficiently, choosing the right architecture for later extensibility, signalling and handling failure gracefully. As the name implies, my aim here is to take experienced intermediate Perl programmers and help them take the next step towards mastery.
This course is a first for me too, in that much of the second day consists of in-depth code reviews and discussions: an extended opportunity to see exactly how the concepts explained on day one translate into complete and usable modules...and how those modules can be evolved over time to become both more maintainable and more powerful.
If you're interested in either of the above classes, or indeed my popular Presentation Skills class, which we'll also be offering in Zurich next month, you can find out all about them...and sign up to attend...on the Oetiker+Partner website.
Damian
[1] ...that I would somehow make it impossible to even open Chapters 2 to 19 until you'd read and understood Chapter 1!
[2] Well, maybe not so very surprising. Strictures, warnings, proper layout, clear decomposition, good documentation, and intentional coding are never not going to be good ideas. And barewords, global variables, punctuation for names, unencapsulated classes, visually or lexically ambiguous syntax, monolithic coding, magic implicit side-effects, and bringing the wrong knife to a gunfight...are always going to be problems.
]]>QCon is an incredibly eclectic conference with a strong real-world focus. The presentations in this year's schedule discuss development in C++, Erlang, Groovy, Grails, HTML5, Java, JavaScript, MongoDB , NoSQL, Scala, and Perl (guess who), ranging over a vast range of topics including: agile development, cloud computing, startups, distributed Systems, REST design, mobile computing (iOS and Android), open data, system architecture, test-driven development, general problem-solving techniques, functional reactive programming, hiring skills, the Pi platform, and programming in Latin (guess who, again).
I've spoken at several of QCon's sibling conference (YOW! in Australia, Goto Aarhus in Denmark) over the past couple of years and always found them to be a great way to bump myself out of my fairly deep Perl rut, while at the same time helping to raise awareness of Perl in some quite different developer communities.
If you're interested in coming along to QCon, or even just to my Presentation tutorial, registrations are now open. There's a price rise coming on February 8th, so you may want to get in quickly. And, regardless of when you register, you can save an extra £100 by using this promotion code: CONW100
Damian
]]>Just two weeks ago, Claes Jakobsson and the wonderful folks at
I am extremely excited to be able to add these events to my schedule as I have never before been to Sweden, nor to an NPW. At the Workshop I'm going to talk about (and demo) my new Regexp::Debugger module...including some brand new and hitherto unreleased features.
If you're going to be in or near Stockholm in the middle of next month and would like to take part in any of these events, you can find out about the Nordic Perl Workshop from the yapc.eu website, and sign up for the training classes on Init's course page.
Hoppas vi ses där!
Damian
]]>The arrangements for that talk are now finalized. My thanks to GULL for providing the venue, and especially to my good friend Frédéric Schütz for arranging everything.
You can get the full details of the event in the official announcement, but briefly:
What: "Taming Perl Regexes"
Where: Beausobre, Morges
When: Monday, September 24, 19:30.
It should be a fun talk, and (for a change) a very practical and useful one!
I hope to see you there.
Damian
]]>Yet now I'm lining up for my second London visit, and second series of public classes, in six months. And the first person I have to thank for that is the same person who took care of me in London on my very first visit, over ten years ago now: the inimitable Dave Cross. It was Dave who put me in touch with the wonderful folks at FlossUK, who are bringing me back in October for a second installment of Presentation Aikido, as well as offering my Understanding Perl Regexes class.
They're both running in central London, so if you missed out on Presentation Aikido back in April, or if you were off sick the day they sat everyone else down and revealed the secret mysteries of regular expressions...October is your second chance.
BTW, if you're thinking of attending either of these classes, you can save around 40% on the fees by taking out a FlossUK membership first (or checking whether your commercial, research or academic institution already has a membership). And if you sign up for the classes before September 15, you can snag the early-bird discount as well.
Damian
PS: I also want to particularly thank Josette Garcia and Mark Keating for their incredible support for this event.
I've been visiting that lovely city for several years now for private classes, but for the first time we have been able to arrange some public training events as well.
We'll be offering the following four classes, with the first three open to the general public. The fourth is only available to academics of SIB and CUSO (and is already almost full):
As these are the first public classes we've been able to run in Romandy, I hope that many local Perl users will finally have the opportunity to come along. If you'd like to attend any of these, we'd love to see you there. You can sign up on the SIB website.
Malheureusement, toutes les classes seront présentées en anglais, parce que mon vocabulaire français n'est pas suffisante pour leur offrir en cette belle langue. D'ailleurs, ma prononciation française ferait pleurer même le plus patient francophone.
As well as the four classes, we'll also be offering a free Perl seminar on the evening of Monday 24 September. The announcement is yet to go out, but as soon as it does I'll post an update with the precise details of location, time, and topic.
Damian
]]>In addition to the two public classes we’re running (and, yes, there are still a few seats left for either day), I’m now also going to be delivering my infamous Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes…Made Easy! presentation, as a free seminar next Thursday night.
This talk has already melted hundreds of geek neocortexes in both London and Oslo in the past fortnight; next week it will wreak its terrible destruction on Lusitanian minds as well.
So, if you’re in Lisbon, don’t miss out on my most brain-twisting talk ever. Thursday May 3 from 7pm at Edifício Fórum Picoas. Entry is free and everyone is welcome (though you do need to register to ensure a seat).
Damian
PS: My sincere thanks to SAPO for sponsoring this event.
]]>Digicomp run a regular seminar series entitled “Open Tuesday” on the first Tuesday of each month, and I’m going to be speaking at that event on (no surprise) Tuesday May 8, from 6pm. Specifically, I’ll be giving my Fun with Dead Languages seminar.
The event is completely free, but they do need people to register so they can manage numbers correctly (just follow the “shopping cart” link on the Open Tuesday webpage)
Meanwhile, my various Perl-related classes at ETH are slowly filling, but there are still plenty of places left if you’re interested in some (entirely new) classes on Test-Driven Development, OO or API design, or optimizing your Perl development processes.
So if you’re in Zurich in early May, sign up for one (or more!) of my events. At very least, drop in to the “Open Tuesday” talk and see me do great and terrible things with ancient langauges.
Damian
]]>We’ll definitely be offering a public talk one evening for the local Open Source community (I’ll update when I have the details), but we’re also running a couple of public classes in Portugal for the first time in several years.
The classes are the recently updated Features of Modern Perls and the hugely popular Mastering Vim, and you can sign up for either (or both, with a discount) on the Caixa Mágica website.
I’m very much looking forward to catching up with many friends in Portugal next month. And, after what will have been nearly a full month in London and Oslo, and as lovely as those two cities are, I suspect I will secretly also be looking forward to some warm and sunny weather as well. ;-)
Damian
]]>Zurich is one of my favorite cities in the world: there’s something undefinably “civilized” about it. It’s elegant, but vibrant, and yet strangely tranquil too. From the glorious lake-front to the sylvan Zurichberg, its natural beauties always draw me back. Not to mention the wonderful food.
And yet, the reason I keep returning to Zurich is not any of those undeniable attractions. It’s the people I meet and work with there. Smart, serious, witty, genuine, and generous people. Developers, academics, and scientists, who are always a pleasure to teach…and a joy to learn from as well.
This year we’re going to try something a little different in Zurich. My previous visits have always been later in the year, but in 2012 we’re experimenting with a Spring schedule with four completely new classes.
It’s taken longer than we’d hoped to arrange our venue and classes1. So much so that there is now only just over a month until the classes begin.
So, if you’re in Zurich (or could be) in early May, and you’re looking for some entirely new classes on designing and developing in Perl, sign up now and join us next month.
What better excuse to be in Zurich in Springtime?!
Damian
1 Previous visits during the summer break, when there is much less demand for teaching spaces, have always been much easier to organize.
]]>“The day you find a job you love, is the last day you’ll ever have to work.”
For me, that day was the day I discovered public speaking.
And for the past decade I’ve made my living doing almost nothing apart from standing in front of an audience and telling them stuff.
Of course, I still code every day…just not for pay. I’ve also done quite a bit of design over the past ten years, but again not for any direct remuneration. It’s teaching and presenting and keynoting that pays the bills and, conveniently, it’s those three activities that I enjoy above all.
So I guess it isn’t surprising that my very favorite presentation, my very favorite thing to teach…is Presentation Skills. Apart from the delicious recursiveness of it1, I truly believe that teaching people how to be more confident, better organized, more communicative, and hence more effective in front of an audience is some of the most important work I ever do. Certainly it seems to inject more good in the world than almost anything else I spend time on2.
I usually only get the chance to help people become better presenters at conferences (where I’m often asked to run a workshop for the speakers). It’s a rare treat to be able to offer the same class to a more general audience. Which is precisely what we’re doing in London in two weeks time: FlossUK is organizing a public rendition of my Presentation Aikido class.
So, if you find you’re terrified of standing in front of an audience, if you dread being asked to deliver a coherent presentation on your area of expertise (or, worse, on your area of non-expertise), or if you actually love speaking in public but simply wish you were better at it, then I’d encourage you to sign up for my class on April 16th.
Let me share my passion for presentation with you, and—more pragmatically—let me teach you all the theory and techniques and tools and even some of the tricks I use to make my presentations as entertaining and as informative as I possibly can.
Let me show you how I do what I love.
And why I love what I do.
PS: If you’re reading this because your interested in presentation skills, but you have no idea who I am, or why I might think I could teach people how to present better…well, hi there! Thanks for reading this far.
And, no, I certainly don’t expect you to take my word for it. Instead, see here and here and here and here and here and maybe even here.
Okay, so it’s true that I do have extremely compromising photos of most of those people (beating children, orphaning widows, voluntarily coding in C++, reading “Twilight” non-ironically, etc.), but I really am also quite good at what I do. And good at teaching others to do it as well.
1When publicly speaking about public speaking I sometimes find it necessary to publicly speak about publicly speaking about public speaking. At which point I’m always tempted to speak publicly about speaking in public about publicly speaking about public speaking. At which point my head explodes.
2Not just the direct good it does for the attendees themselves, but also the greatly magnified good it does for entire audiences if even one student goes away and can subsequently deliver a tighter, more relevant, more interesting, and more entertaining presentation that doesn’t suck.
]]>The talk will be delivered at The Scotsman (2nd floor), Karl Johans gate 17 on Thursday 19 April, starting at 18:00. Admission is free and everyone is welcome.
See Salve's blog posting or the Oslo.pm homepage for full details.
]]>So, after a fantastic visit last August, I was delighted to be invited back to Oslo next month. There will nearly a full week of public events, all of which are open for anyone who wants to be involved.
First up, Oslo.pm is running three more Perl courses at Redpill Linpro's great training facility in Storo from Wednesday April 18. Two of those three courses are world premieres (of my brand new Testing and API Design classes), and the third is one of my all-time most popular classes: the ever-evolving "Productive Programmer" seminar. All the classes will be in English, and if you're interested in taking part, registrations are now open.
During those three days (probably on the evening of Thursday April 19), I will
be giving a free seminar for Oslo.pm. The title will be
"Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple
Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes...Made Easy!"
which, as you can see, will have something for everyone. We haven't
confirmed the date, venue, or time yet, but I'll definitely be giving
this talk at some point during my visit, and I'll update this blog when
I know the precise details.
[Update: We now have full spacetime coordinates on the event. See Salve's blog posting or the Oslo.pm homepage for details.]
Then from Friday night until Sunday, Oslo.pm and Redpill Linpro are hosting a Perl 6 hackathon. These face-to-face meetings by the Perl 6 development team are all too rare, but incredibly valuable for thrashing out critical details of the Rakudo compiler. This time we're privileged to have so many of the key developers gathering for the event. Hopefully, we'll be able to announce significant progess as a result of our discussions and work over the week-end. I know we'll definitely be able to announce that we had a great time together: it's always a remarkable experience to be in a room with such an extreme concentration of intellect, ability, and humour. This is not a private or closed-door meeting, so if you're in Oslo that week-end and interested in helping make Perl 6 better, please come along.
Immediately after the hackathon, on Monday April 23, it's the Go Open conference, where I'll be presenting a keynote on "The Other S.E.T.I." ("Successfully Exploiting Techno-Innocence"). I've heard amazing things about past Go Open events and I'm really looking forward to participating this year. The programme looks great.
So that's six straight days of Open Source awesomeness, in one of the most beautiful and civilized cities in the world. I can't wait!
(My deepest gratitude to the board and members of Oslo.pm, the team at Redpill Linpro, Jan Ingvoldstad, the NUUG Foundation, the programme committee of Go Open 2012, and to the many other supporters and sponsors of these events. Most especially, to Salve Nilsen, who has been a force of nature in devising, negotiating, planning, and/or arranging every one of the abovementioned events. Thank-you all for making this amazing week possible.)
]]>So it's an unusual pleasure to be offering two classes in both Melbourne and Brisbane in the next month or so. As part of the YOW! 2011 conference, I'm running my "Perl Best Practices" class (on Nov 29 in Melbourne and Dec 7 in Brisbane) and my "Presentation Aikido" class (on Nov 30 in Melbourne and Dec 8 in Brisbane). That second class is a particular rarity, as I've never before offered it as a public class in Australia.
So if your interested in improving either your mastery of Perl or your skills as a presenter, click on the links and sign up!
Damian
]]>That's why, for the past few years, I've been running public classes in
Perl, Vim, and presentation skills in Zurich each summer.
This year is no different. From next Monday, I'm offering six classes on
basic and intermediate Perl topics, and one each on Vim and
presentation.
It's very late notice, I know, but we still have some seats available,
so if you find you have a day or two spare in the next two weeks, and
you've been looking for a chance to take one of my classes (or just want a
pretext to visit one of the loveliest cities in Europe ;-), then this
might be an excellent opportunity.
You can find the details of the classes we're offering, and the registration
links for them at: http://it.oetiker.ch/consulting/courses/2011.en.html.
Damian
]]>