I've had many ideas for introduce Perl conference beginners into the community. Dom also had some ideas in How to make Perl conferences beginner friendly. Steal what you like, share what works!

I fixed some tests in Module::Release because I supported v-strings and dev versions at the same time. Even though I don't use v-strings, the module would recognize v1.2.3_1. Andreas caught this because he does this amazing work to test CPAN breakage. John Peacock noted that version changed due to the "Lyon Compromise" from the 2014 Perl QA Hackathon. I know about the /users/brian_d_foy/conferences/index.html

Saint Perl 6 started with its hack day instead of putting it at the end. I can summarize some of the proceeding, but some of the end-of-day reports were delivered in Russian. Someone else will have to fill in the blanks.

I mentioned my CPAN Testers from GitHub idea and some people looked into it. Miyagawa has a gitpan.pl gist that fakes out CPAN.pm with ="http://www.metacpan.org/mod…

The Swiss Perl Workshop did not disappoint, although as a featured speaker there was plenty to worry about. One of the organizers, Matthias Bloch, was well trained to take care of the chaotic situation of herding cats and programmers. He was a trained primary school instructor, in which he explained the getting a group of first graders to do anything is much harder. I'm dubious, having been to many workshops, but everything went well. The trick is to embrace the fear.

="https://blogs.perl.org/users/brian_d_foy/s…

Curtis Poe, one of the top presenters in the world of Perl (and testing and ...) recently posted How Do Conference Speakers Get Compensated? in LinkedIn. There had been a bit of a kerfuffle on the YAPC Europe Conference Organizers mailing list after some mail that would have been better handled in private email.

/users/brian_d_foy/conferences/index.html

My Polish Perl Workshop talk on taking an existing Perl installation and creating a CPAN-like repository that would create it.

Want to make YAPC a game? Want elite points for doing things at YAPC? Want to be the person to give out the points?

JT Smith was at the Windy City Perl Mongers last night giving his The Game Crafter talk as an exemplar of the talks he wants at YAPC in Madison. It's more about his application of Perl to one of his businesses than just explaining another module or framework.

After the talk when JT and I were headed back uptown, we started talking about achievements for YAPC. You do somet…

Speaking to the non-english audience

I went to Rio after the São Paulo Perl Workshop. Doesn't it look like fun? Don't you want to come to YAPC::Brazil to have as much fun?

Last night Breno took me to Dojo Rio. I had never been to a Dojo before, and it was a very cool way to socialize and learn about other languages. I don't think this meeting was typical because I gave a short TDD presentation first where I started with a new Perl module then slowly added some features to it. I should have screencasted it, but I forgot to set that up.

Some of the people weren't strong in Perl, but most of them knew the ideas. After they watched me make several mistakes, we eventually got through adding tests and implementing a new method. Part of the Dojo idea is that you have to let the person working in front of the group puzzle out the problem on their own.

In the second half was even cooler though. The Dojo starts with two pair programmers and a four minute timer. They work on the agreed-on problem for four minutes, then one person steps out and another steps in. They implement as much as they can in the four minutes before they rotate again.

Our problem for the night was FizzBin (which is also a Learning Perl exercise). When it was my turn to be one on the pair, I said that we should test random multiples of three. We started with a line of code like this:

foreach my $i ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    is( fizzbin( $i * 3 * ( rand(100) + 1 ) ), 'bin', 'Works for multiple of three' );
    }

Now, for most people, it's obvious that it's broken, but in the Dojo format, the audience jsut watches and they aren't supposed to yell out the answer. After a couple of test runs, we regained our senses and remembered that rand returns a non-integer, so we need to int:

foreach my $i ( 1 .. 10 ) {
    is( fizzbin( $i * 3 * int ( rand(100) + 1 ) ), 'bin', 'Works for multiple of three' );
    }

Yeah, I'm as dumb as the next coder.

At the end of the night, the group went through what was good and what they could improve about the coding exercise (my contribution was to use table-driven testing).

I'd write more but I have to go have more fun in Rio. :)

Tomorrow I leave for the São Paulo Perl Workshop. I thought for a bit on what I would want to talk about, which always depends on the audience. For this one, I'll go for the general audience.

Why I Love Perl: The CPAN Ecosystem