Wolfgang Kinkeldei

During the afternoon we had a couple of interesting talks.

Steffen Winker talked about Testing binary data. He mentioned several distributions being capable of generating useful messages in case of test failures. It turns out that only meaningful messages enable the developer to quickly be able to react to failing tests. All of the four candidates Test::BinaryData, Test::Bits, Test::HexString or Test::HexDifferences are doing a good job and it is merely a matter of taste or the amount of binary data which one to use.

Sebastian Willing was talking about his logging experience in his daily business. His company has taylored a solution receiving lots of messages with mixed severities from different sources. All messages are grouped by events which are basically the body of a message without any variable data. Using this approach lots of consequential messages differing only by eg. line number receive be a repetitive message. All these messages are then assigned to tickets and depending on frequency, amount of messages and their content actions are taken. The backend system also knows several filter rules to avoid spamming. The system he demonstrated looks promising and many people wished to get something similar.

After the lightning talks Getty was talking about various experiences he received from his work. Several people inside the same company might have different views of the same thing. This might result in different priorities assigned to various tasks. He presented his analysis of success sometimes based on political or ecominical things outside of his comany's influence. However quality products are important otherwise success may get missed. His closing words were the Call-For-Applications written in Perl. Applications instead of Libraries and Modules :-)