Welcome to the Perl Toolchain Summit 2026!
This post is adapted from my notes and recollection of the welcome speech I gave on the morning of Thursday April 23, 2026, just before the initial stand-up.
This post is brought to you by Geizhals Preisvergleich, a Gold sponsor for the Perl Toolchain Summit 2026.
You can learn more about Geizhals at the end of this article.
Welcome to the sixteenth Perl Toolchain Summit 2026!
This is not the first time we're gathering in Vienna. Back in 2010, the third Perl QA Hackathon was held in Vienna, and organized 100% locally.
Nowadays, the Perl Toolchain Summit is organized in a distributed fashion, with a global team managing the invitations and the recurring sponsors, and the local team finding the venue, the hotel, and organizing the activities around the event (like the pre-conference meeting yesterday).
So I'd like to begin with a big thank you to the Vienna team:
You might know that the French are very proud of their croissants. I personally got into heated arguments with Italian colleagues about the Italian variations stuffed with jam (I've wisened up since). Here's a bit of trivia for this you: the generic name for these sweet dough products at the meeting point between bread and pastry in French is viennoiseries. This morning, thanks to Wikipedia, I learnt that, though the shape is Austrian-inspired, the recipe was developed in France in the nineteenth century. That's it for the history lesson.
We try to make this event as cheap as possible to attend for you, the people who are going to work for free for the benefit of the Perl communities. It wouldn't be possible without our sponsors. Or at least, it would cost you a lot more to attend.
We're trying to recognize support in all its form: financial (sending us money directly) and in-kind (paying for some of our attendees expenses directly). Some sponsors even contribute both ways.
At the Diamond level, we are very lucky to have:
- The Perl and Raku Foundation
- a very generous anonymous donor
Gold sponsors:
Silver sponsors:
- SUSE
- Trans-Formed Media
Bronze sponsors:
We also received monetary support from the community:
- Harald Jörg
- Michele Beltrame, Sigmafin
- our anonymous donor who's been making a monthly donation for several years now
While the size of the group has stabilized around thirty people, and some of us are very regular attendees (heya Merijn!), we're also making a genuine effort to invite people to their first Perl Toolchain Summit. This year, our first timers are Robert Rothenberg, Karl Williamson and Andy Baugh.
As you've seen, new blood is not necessarily young blood. I'm a bit worried that the average age of this group is basically growing by one year every year (someday I'll do the maths). I wonder who is the youngest in the group. Is there anyone below 40? [It took little time to find the youngest member of the group, and he was just 40 years old.]
Speaking of regular attendees, you might have noticed a few people are missing. At least one of them has a good excuse: Ingy döt Net couldn't attend this year, because he got married yesterday to Ashley!
Once again, all Perl Steering Council members are attending, the MetaCPAN team has already annexed an appropriately sized room for themselves, and our whiteboard already has a few discussions listed.
A few announcements before we start:
- the group dinner will happen on Friday evening
- we'll do the annual group photo on Saturday
- I will be recording interviews for The Underbar podcast all of Sunday
Now it's time for the stand-up. Given how many of us there are, we want to keep it short, really a few sentences per person. Tell us you name and nickname, for those who don't know you yet, and what you plan to work on this year.
I expect that tomorrow, we'll already be talking about results!
About Geizhals Preisvergleich
For over 25 years, Perl has been at the core of our technical ecosystem. It has also been instrumental in building one of the leading product price comparison services in the German-speaking region. At Geizhals Preisvergleich, we are proud to sponsor the 2026 edition of the Perl Toolchain Summit and to support the continued development of the core Perl ecosystem we have long relied on -- and continue to rely on today.
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