Leon Timmermans

A week ago I attended the 2025 PTS. For me it was a different PTS than the previous ones.

Firstly because it was my first PTS without Abe Timmerman. He was a regular in both the PTS (as maintainer of Test::Smoke), and of the Amsterdam Perl Mongers. In fact the last time I saw him was on our flight back to Amsterdam after the PTS in Lisbon last year. He was greatly missed.

Secondly, because of a question that Book asked at the very beginning of the PTS: how often we had been to the PTS before. I was one of the few who had attended more than 10 of them. Combined with the fact that several other regular attendees couldn't make it that meant that this PTS I spent more time than ever on helping others with various issues.

I also spent quite a bit of time in discussions. Most obviously on the future of the CPAN Security group that I joined last year. I also spent time giving feedback to the new CPAN Testers group, and talked with a bunch of people to get feedback on my idea to write a new CPAN client.

But obviously I also did a lot of programming work. I synced up a year's worth of updates on ExtUtils::ParseXS to CPAN (more changes are coming up from David Mitchell after 5.42). I released a new ExtUtils::Builder::Compiler (now working with Microsoft's compiler thanks to Mithaldu helping me out). I made ExtUtils::Manifest compatible with Test2::Harness/yath after someone (Breno?) pointed out it wasn't. I released a new App::ModuleBuildTiny with better configuration options after I sat down with Paul Evans to observe his release process. I fixed a minor issue in Dist::Zilla::Plugin::ModuleBuildTiny on older perls that Julien had pointed out to me. I worked on making Module::Build::Tiny's XS support more compatible with Devel::Cover after Paul Johnson pointed out that combination didn't work. I worked on making Test::Harness more asynchronous/parallel. I released a new Software::License and worked on improving PAUSE's password handling. And I updated experimental.pm for 5.42.

I spent a bunch of time investigating how to get TLS support into core. This is much more complicated than one might hope; partially because Net::SSLeay is a 29 years old large XS module (OpenSSL forked from SSLeay in 1998…), and partially because OpenSSL itself deeply depends on Perl in its build system. This is looking like it will be my next big project.

And I scared everyone by tripping on a ramp that got treacherously slippy in the rain. I didn't break anything. I think.

All in all I had a really useful PTS, even if I mostly did completely different things from what I had been initially planning.

All of this wouldn't be possible without our wonderful organizers (Daniel, Philippe, Laurent, Tina and Breno), as well as our sponsors:

Monetary Sponsors

Booking.com, WebPros, CosmoShop, Datensegler, OpenCage, SUSE, Simplelists Ltd, Ctrl O Ltd, Findus Internet-OPAC, plusW GmbH

In-kind sponsors

Grant Street Group, Fastmail, shift2, Oleeo, Ferenc Erki

Community Sponsors

The Perl and Raku Foundation, Japan Perl Association, Harald Joerg, Alexandros Karelas (PerlModules.net), Matthew Persico, Michele Beltrame (Sigmafin), Rob Hall, Joel Roth, Richard Leach, Jonathan Kean, Richard Loveland, Bojan Ramsa