NeilB

This year's Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS) is being held in the UK, in the historic town of Marlow, which is about 30 miles west of London.

In this post we'll give an overview of the PTS and who attends, the venue, and the plans for this year. All of the attendees are volunteers, who mostly work on the CPAN ecosystem in their spare time, so the event is supported by sponsorship. If your company uses Perl, maybe you could support the PTS?

The Summit is an annual gathering where we bring together the people who develop the core CPAN services and the suite of tools, services, and modules that make up the CPAN ecosystem. These allow end-users of Perl to find, install, and use modules (and have confidence in them), and then develop, test, and release their own modules, should they want to.

About thirty experienced toolsmiths will come to Marlow to work together on bug fixes, new functionality, and addressing cross-component issues that can be resolved much more effectively. In the coming weeks the selected attendees will assemble a tentative project list on the PTS wiki. In addition to this, there are also plenty of ideas that spring forth during the event, a product of having all the right people in the same place, sparking off each other. The "being in the same place" is a key benefit, as it enables discussions that would take place over IRC, github issues, and email.

Why should you care? The people coming to the event are responsible for CPAN, PAUSE, ExtUtils::MakeMaker, Module::Build, Dist::Zilla, MetaCPAN, CPAN clients, CPAN Testers, CPANTS, Test2, Devel::Cover, YAML modules, and much more besides. Together these are the shoulders that we all stand on as Perl developers.

For this twelfth edition, the entire event is being hosted at Bisham Abbey, which was once home to Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Attendees will be working in the Abbey itself, and staying in the National Sports Centre, which is part of the same complex. PTS runs from Thursday 25th April through Sunday 28th.

PTS 2019 is being organised by a team who are all experienced with this event: Neil Bowers, Philippe Bruhat, and Laurent Boivin have all been helped with 5 or more editions of this event. Neil is hosting the event -- Marlow is his home town.

This event is only made possible with the support of our community: many of the attendees could not come without their travel and or accommodation being covered by sponsorship. If you're interested in helping the PTS, please get in touch with Neil: neil at bowers dot com.