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This post is adapted from my notes and recollection of the welcome speech I gave on the morning of Thursday May 1st, 2025, just before the initial stand-up.

This post is brought to you by Booking.com, the Diamond sponsor for the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025.

Booking.com is proud to sponsor the 2025 Perl Toolchain Summit as Perl continues to be a vital piece of our technology stack. We continue to rely on the Perl platform and tooling to serve millions of customers every day, helping them experience the world. Other than our interest in the evolution and modernization of the platform and tooling, the PTS is also a great opportunity to connect with the larger community and share learnings about how other companies and projects are tackling the challenges of working with Perl at scale (talking about both in systems and teams scalability), and how Perl fits an ever-changing and diverse technological landscape in other organizations.

You can learn more about Booking.com at the end of this article.

Welcome to the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025!

As you know (this bit is really meant for the people who'll be reading this in the future, when I actually publish this speech) the Perl Toolchain Summit is a worldwide gathering happening in Europe since 2008. We bring together the volunteers who work on the tools and modules at the heart of Perl and the CPAN ecosystem, and they get 4 days to work together on these systems, with all their fellow volunteers at hand, without distraction. This is an invitation-only event, with a focus on getting things done.

As I said, the Summit is happening in Europe. We've been to Norway, the United Kingdom, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Portugal.

We're back in Germany this year, for the 15th edition, with our "local organizers" Daniel Böhmer and Tina Müller. While this is his first Perl Toolchain Summit, Daniel organized the German Perl Workshop in 2022 in this very hotel and also the 2021 edition, which ended up to be held online. Tina organized the Perl QA Hackathon (that was before the name change) in Berlin in 2015. They were contenders for organizing the 2024 edition, which happened in Lisbon, Portugal.

I personally love the first few minutes of a conference, from the point of view of an organizer: everything you worked for (more or less assiduously over the months) finally falls into place, and the event opens its wings and takes a life of its own. It's the moment it finally exists, and also the moment you lose control.

I especially love the Perl Toolchain Summit as an event, not just because I've followed it since the beginning (I was invited in 2008, but couldn't attend), but because of the crowd that attends it. It's a very special group of people. Everyone who is here has one or more projects they're contributing to, a clear set of goals, and they want to make the most of the limited, priviledged time we'll spend together (Sunday is just around the corner, you'll see). It feels awesome to be here, with this group, and to watch you work your ass off to make the Perl ecosystem better.

The organizing team is split in two: we have a local team, who deals with finding the venue and is our local liaison with the hotel, the restaurants, and other local providers. It really helps the relationship when they can talk to someone who speak their language, and maybe even meet them face to face. It's much easier to build trust than with "faceless people from the Internet". The remote/global part of the team is handling the invitations, the communication, and the crucial resource: money. Laurent is our money person.

As everyone who has ever organized one knows, an event like this would not be possible without our sponsors.

We have two kinds of sponsors: our financial sponsors send money to Les Mongueurs de Perl, the French non-profit that legally handles the organization of the event (they get an invoice in return), and expect the organizers to spend it on PTS expenses. We also have in-kind sponsors, companies whose employees are invited and that decide to cover their travel and accommodation expenses, and let them spend paid work time on the event. It's still money, even it didn't go through the Mongueurs bank account, and it also made this event possible.

Booking.com is our Diamond Sponsor: they've been a writing a big cheque ever since we rebooted the PTS in 2023.

Webpros is our Gold sponsor, sending us Todd Rinaldo and Nicolas Rochelemagne.

We have several Silver sponsors:

• cosmoshop,
• Fastmail was supporting Matthew Horsfall, but he had to cancel at the last minute.
• OpenCage, who also sponsors MetaCPAN,
• Datensegler
• SUSE

Our Bronze sponsors are:

• Findus Internet-OPAC,
• Ctrl-O, a regular, just like
• simplelists
• plusW.

As I mentioned earlier in-kind sponsors cover their employees costs directly:

• Grant Street Group sent us Chad Granum,
• Shift2 covers H.Merijn Brand's expenses,
• Oleeo invests in Perl by sending us Julien Fiegehenn and Jordan Lovett (who is one of our first-time attendees this year),
• Ferenc Erki is sending us... Ferenc Erki.

This is a community event, and there are community members who send money directly too:

• Harald Jörg,
• one anonymous donor who makes a regular monthly donation,
• Alexandros Karelas from PerlModules.net,
• Matthew Persico,
• Michele Beltrame from Sigmafin,
• Joel Roth,
• Richard Leach,
• Jonathan Kean,
• Robert Hall,
• Richard Loveland,
• Bojan Ramsa.

Any money left over is used to kickstart the budget for the event the following year, as is our tradition since 2011.

Since the post-COVID reboot of 2023, we've made a point of inviting people to their first PTS, to ensure some renewal. We're trying to get new blood, even if it's not always young blood.

In 2023, we had 3 first time attendees (Julien Fiegehenn and Paul Evans are here today). In 2024, we had 5 (only Tim Legge is here), and this year we have 6! Please give a warm welcome to Daniel Böhmer, Thibault Duponchelle, Ferenc Erki, Jordan Lovett, Ruth Holloway, and Mohammad S Anwar!

Over the years, I've counted about 125 unique participants to the Perl Toolchain Summit and Perl QA Hackathon. Many of the one-time participants were from local Perl Mongers group, back when the event was open to everyone.

People only are first-timers really once, and not everyone becomes a regular. And we do have regulars! Who here has attended 5 or more PTS? (many people people raise their hand), who has attended more than 10? (much less hands remain raised) And once again, Merijn remains the undisputed winner of this little game, being the only person having attended all editions of the event! (Applause)

Sadly, this year is also the first time when we know that someone will never attend again. I would like us to take a moment to honour Abe Timmerman, who was an avid participant of this Summit (he attended all editions between 2009 and 2024) and who passed away in August last year.

Abe championed the Test::Smoke project created by Merijn, a set of scripts and modules to run Perl core tests on as many configurations as possible and combine the results into an easy to read report. It quickly became a cornerstone of Perl's reliability, helping improve not just Perl, but even entire operating systems (like FreeBSD).

Abe was a friend to many of us, and will be missed.

Abe at the Perl Toolchain Summit in Lisbon, 2024.
Image is licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0 International © 2024 Salve J. Nilsen. Some rights reserved.
Wendy van Dijk created a memorial album of Abeltje after Abe's passing.

His legacy also serves as an important reminder that the work that we do here goes beyond our individual engagement. A toolchain project should thrive regardless of our personal involvement, and be open and inviting to new contributors to both help us in our journey and to carry the torch when we are not there.

And I'm happy to tell you than Test::Smoke has found a new home (it's hosted on the MetaCPAN infrastructure nowadays) and a new maintainer (Thibault Duponchelle). Abe's legacy lives on.

Test::Smoke is not the only project changing hands: this year Doug Bell is here to help build a bigger team around CPAN Testers, which has been a one-person project for too long. It was a one-person stunt when Barbie handed it to him, and this project is too important to Perl and CPAN to fall victim of the proverbial bus.

Before I leave you to do the important stuff, I have a few practical announcements to make (which are not relevant for the readers of the blog post):

• we're expected to be here from 9am in the morning to 6pm in the afternoon
• there's a whiteboard, please use it to organize meetings and presentations
• we have the key to the room, so you can leave your stuff here, and it should be safe
• lunch today is provided by the hotel, and will start at 1pm
• tomorrow, Daniel is organizing a walking tour of Leipzig, that will last about one hour and a half and takes us from here to the the conference dinner (you can also join us directly at the restaurant, if you want to skip the long walk)
• we'll make a group photo on Saturday, most likely before lunch
• I want to collect as much data as possible about the total cost of a PTS, so I'll be walking around asking you about your travel expenses
• for those who are getting travel and accommodation support from the PTS, talk to Laurent

As I mentioned earlier, the Toolchain Summit is an event of traditions:

• the MetaCPAN table has likely already been setup, practically as the doors of this room opened
• important discussions will happen here, as they do every year (sometimes leading to community-shaping consensus decisions)
• we will have a group photo
• the Perl Steering Council will have its third face-to-face meeting in as many years
• and maybe a connection with a future new PSC member will be made around a drink, here at the PTS again. Last year, late on the last night of the event, Aristotle came to Paul, Graham and I, asking innocently "How much time does the PSC work take you guys?"

Our final tradition is the daily stand-up. Today, we'll go around the room, and have everyone present themselves, and their plans for the next four days.

And tomorrow we'll start talking about results.

About Booking.com

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