O'Reilly Verlag supports the German Perl community since many years and the sponsor this years' YAPC::Europe as well. Thanks!
The O'Reilly Verlag is the German subsidiary of the internationally successful publisher O'Reilly Media, Inc.
O'Reilly provides information on important and cutting-edge technologies through high-quality textbooks, digital content, websites and conferences.
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Last week I attended the YAPC:NA 2012 in Madison, WI and I wanted to pass along a few observations from a recruiters point of view. Having recruited Perl developers for Shutterstock in NYC , there is a perception in the recruiting community that Perl is a dying language, there is a lot of unmaintainable code, and that Perl programmers are nearly impossible to find. Shutterstock has had a lot of success with Perl so why all the negativity? And while the company does have a lot of really smart, cool Perl developers, it is a hiring challenge. Anyway, when I arrived at the conference, I was surprised at how down to earth and friendly everyone seemed to be, not to mention a fairly large number of younger developers and recent graduates who loved Perl. You could really sense the power of the community they all shared. One of the guys I spoke with had graduated from an engineering program several years back and had learned perl on his own. He claimed it was a fun and powerful language and sure, he does stuff in other languages, but Perl is his workhorse. He went on and on about how quickly and efficiently you can get stuff done using the free tools that Perl provides. No shame. The other observation was how much support there is around the language. My Perl coworker was able to recognize just about anyone from their IRC handle. Apparently the IRC chat is a place where most Perl people hang out to ask questions and help out the the newbie. Seems to me that Perl is alive and well, but unless you live in the Perl world, it can be hard to see that. Perhaps it's time we bring a new message about Perl to recruiters.
We’ve begun uploading all the videos for YAPC::NA 2012 to YouTube. By the end of the week we should have them all complete. They’ll also be added to PresentingPerl.org. Enjoy!
This is just a reminder for you if you plan to submit a talk to YAPC::Europe 2012 in Frankfurt: The talk submission deadline is 15th July 2012. This is next week!
Please also remember
Proceedings
We'd like to print the proceedings, so talk handouts are important too! We think that proceedings are a good way to call back the talks you have heard and to get more information about topics you were unable to attend.
The deadline to submit the articles to us is July 25th!
Videos
We'd like to record the talks. Please let us know when you want us to not record your talk.
YAPC::NA 2012 was excellent! I really want to congratulate the organizers, staff, and sponsors for putting together such a well-organized, informative, and fun event. I had not been to a YAPC in a couple of years, and this year's conference made me wonder why I had stayed away so long. It was great to hear so many people using Perl for so many cool and exciting things!
Regarding my own talk: After talking to several attendees about Helios, and being encouraged to be less of a "Kirk" and more of a "Picard," I've created a repository on Github for Helios. Going forward it will be easier for others to follow development, contribute, and take advantage of all the goodness Github provides. If you missed my "Distributed Processing Applications with Helios" talk and want some more information, the talk is now available on YouTube (thanks again MadMongers and all the YAPC::NA volunteers!) and the slides are available here.
Now that the official YAPC::NA 2012 talks are making their way online I wanted to post links to all of the relevant material for each talk.
Thanks again to all of you who attended my talks and asked great questions. To those of you watching for the first time, please ask me questions, I will be happy to help (if I can) or discuss my methods/paradigms/simulations.
Baby XS to get you started
A primer for writing XS for people who know Perl and a least a little C.
Modeling Physical Systems Using Modern Object-Oriented Perl
In which I show off my object-oriented paradigms for simulating physical systems; forces and physical objects are just objects, interactions are mediated by coderefs. I also give a simple example and show off some of my real-world simulations.
The reason for this is a quite annoying bug (or missing feature) which displayed content from POD-links (the L tag) as is. Luckily this just occurred for the Mobi-format.
To fix this, we released a new version ob EBook::MOBI (v0.46) and added some minor changes to perlybook.org to allow better support.
Clinton Gormley will give a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 described as
Elastic::Model is a new framework to store your Moose objects, which uses ElasticSearch as a NoSQL document store and flexible search engine.
It is designed to make small beginnings simple, but to scale easily to Big Data requirements without needing to rearchitect your application. No job too big or small!
This talk will introduce Elastic::Model, demonstrate how to develop a simple application, introduce some more advanced techniques, and discuss how it uses ElasticSearch to scale.
Antelink is a french startup, specializing in
Software Life Cycle Management and Open Source Component Detection. They
provided us with cool Dancer sourcecode analyzis graphs.
Overall contribution by users
.pm files contribution by users
Pod files contribution by users
Test files contribution by users
Reading these graphs
The surfaces represent a mean between the number of commits, and the weight of
modifications contributed (in term of "code line"), only when these are
original content addition. Moving content around isn't counted as active
contribution.
Note that some people are registered twice with different names, I'll try to
post an updated version
What does that demonstrate ? It shows that Dancer is really powered by its
community. Decisions are made together, the code is hacked by multiple hands,
and the management is done in a collegial manner on github.
It's a great reward to be visible on these graphs :)
For those new to this blog
Marpa is something new in parsing --
it parses anything you can write in BNF and,
if your grammar is in one of the classes currently in practical use,
parses it in linear time.
Marpa::R2's parse engine is written in optimized C,
so that Marpa::R2's speed is competitive with parsers of far less power.
The Intro to Mojolicious talk at YAPC::NA 2012 was a success!
One person came up afterwards and told me it was one of the most cogent talks at the conference. Awesome! I was definitely shooting for cogent. Someone else even mentioned that it was their favorite talk of the event, and that is indeed high praise for which I am truly grateful.
I put a lot of work into the flow of the presentation, intending for it to come across as much like a mojocast as possible. In watching the video content all over the web, I've noticed a distinct lack of cohesion in the presentation of information, and I wanted to make sure I've done everything possible to ease the transition of data into others' brains.
It's fantastic that a subset of the videos have been posted to youtube; that many more search results for modern Perl information. The more creative lightning talks were my favorite.
Sometimes, the the video of the speaker covers up necessary information in the slides:
Tudor Constantin will give a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 described as
Upgrade your web application development tools to the 2012 year. Bootstrap from twitter, Mojolicious, DBIx::Class and Behavior Driven Development, deployed on dotCloud - modern tools which are working great together in order to please all the actors involved: the customers, the business analysts and most importantly(from our perspective) us, the Perl hackers.
At YAPC::NA 2012 I gave a talk about Moose, and I've uploaded the slides.
The talk was fairly successful and people approached me later and said they enjoyed it and found it very useful. I'm happy to hear that. I hope they will help you too. :)
If you have any questions regarding the slides, please let me know. The video should follow at some point.
I was told color-blind people might have trouble with some red on green emphasis in the slides. Do not worry, slideshare shows the entire text under the slides so you'll able to see it. Sorry about that, I'll be sure to use a different color schema next time.
In my previous post oalders (of Metacpan) asked me about how working on Windows influenced the process and in answering him i got a bit more wordy, so here's another post:
Video is a bit easier on Windows because, even if many of those are very amateur, it has a wider spread of tools available. However, that said, i still needed a bunch of linux tools (that i could luckily run on windows).
First issue was to free the stream from the Silverlight player. As mentioned in the previous blog post, lots of people helped with that.
Hakim Cassimally will give a talk at YAPC::Europe 2012 described as
An introduction to the exciting world of the Internet of Things (IoT). Connecting physical objects (bubble machines, lamps, plants, chicken-feed silos) to microcontrollers and to the internet.
We'll look at IoT in general, but also how Perl powers things like:
* Early prototypes of Bubblino
* Russell Davies's project "Ghostbox" (internet radio)
* Clockodillo (WIP) API
We thought it might be interesting to share some stats about Wifi from YAPC::NA 2012 this year to help future conference and workshop organizers plan their wifi needs better.
Take a look at the following graphs. We had more devices connected to the network in the two buildings we occupied than any other time in the past year. The network engineers actually said that we had more connected than any time in history for those two buildings.
Well its that time again. Thankfully the news is getting better once more!
Much of my time which is earmarked for Perl went to preparing for my YAPC talks. I’m glad they went so well; thanks to all of you who attended. I did even get a question about Alien::Base during one of the Q&As; I’m glad to know that people are interested.
The news this month hopefully is that Windows is passing tests! Or it should once some windows tests show up. It passes on the only windows dev box that I have access to.
Also I have begun work on the fixes for the Mac problem I described last month. I still would like to figure out some way to ensure that the linker flag -header-pad_max_install_names is passed rather than ensuring a really long build path is used. Perhaps using the Makefile ENV => Variables trick? Of course that assumes your project uses make and doesn’t clobber variables but appends to them.
I was very surprised how beautiful an american city can be. I was prepared.
An independent analysis put Madison at position 3 for best place for all american young adults to live in.
"Average paychecks for young adults aren't anything to brag about, but Madison does pride itself on other unparalleled pros: steady job growth, a perennially low unemployment rate and a huge population of twentysomethings. The Wisconsin capital has added more than 24,500 jobs since 2000, and state officials recently announced plans to add 25,000 more bioscience jobs in the next five years. Madison is also known for its quirky, progressive and hyper-literate urban culture. Satirical stalwart The Onion got its start here in 1988, and the University of Wisconsin, a host of music venues and one of the country's largest farmers' markets call Madison home."
