lpw

The organisers of the London Perl Workshop 2017 are very happy to announce that the videos of the talks are now on YouTube. In the rest of this post we'll give a summary of the videos, with links to each talk.

For LPW 2017 we decided to spend more money on video production, so that good quality videos of the talks would be available to the general Perl community. This involved spending money on cameras, wireless microphones, etc, and paying Amanda of A Crow Consulting (acrowconsulting@gmail.com) to do post-production. We'll be doing a separate blog post on that, but please let us know if you think the effort and expenditure was worthwhile (either in the comments here, or via email to organisers at londonperlworkshop dot org).

We didn't record the separate tutorial track, and sadly we didn't get a recording of Leon Timmermans's talk.

Plenary

• Ann Barcomb's plenary, "Fifteen years of contributing casually", covered her research into episodic or ad-hoc contributions to open source projects, and what that might mean for all of us.

Programming Languages

• Simon Proctor, "Perl 6: A Whistle-Stop Tour", was what it says on the tin.
• Steven Goodwin, "All languages are equal, but some languages are more equal than others", shared what he learned implementing the same thing in 16 different languages.
• Mark Sta Ana, "An Introduction to Rust", was a whistle-stop tour of Rust, the rust community, who's using Rust, and more.
• Sue Spence, "Spiders, Gophers, and Butterflies", is about Sue's experience implementing a website crawler in Perl 6 and Go, and comparing concurrency support in both languages.
• Malcolm Sherrington, "Julia and Perl: Strange Bedfellows?", showed how Julia and Perl complement each other.
• JJ Merelo, "Perl6 as a first language", advocates for Perl 6 as a language for teaching complete beginners.

Web stuff

• Dave Cross, "Web-site Tune-up - Improve your Googlejuice", showed ways to make your website more Google-friendly.
• Mike Whitaker, "Dancer2::Session::DynamoDB", talked about a session handler for Dancer2 using AWS DynamoDB.
• Max Maischein, "Web automation with WWW::Mechanize::Chrome", showed how to automatically drive websites using WWW::Mechanize::Chrome.

Developer

• Tom Hukins, "Development: more than writing code?", is a rumination on the things developers do other than writing code, and how to do them well.
• Paul Johnson, "Modernising a Legacy Perl Application", is Paul's advice on how to approach refactoring an older Perl application.
• Colin Newell, "Why learning a bit of Crypto is good for you", tried to persuade us why we should all care a bit more about the random number generator we're using, and to use encryption appropriately.
• Paul Evans, "Devel::MAT updated", covers recent changes in his memory leak/usage toolkit, Devel::MAT.
• Jeff Goff (DrForr), "Art of Programming", appears to be a talk about both programming and origami.
• Julien Fiegehenn, "Turning humans into developers with Perl", was his thoughts on teaching people to program, with Perl.

Tools

• Ed J, "GraphQL in Perl, the story so far", introduced GraphQL (a data query language), and talked about what Perl support is available and coming.
• Tina Müller, "YAML - where and how to use? What's new?", introduced YAML, talks about when it can be a better choice than JSON, and the CPAN modules for YAML available.
• Leon Timmermans thinks many of us might be using Dist::Zilla wrong, and he plans to set us straight.
• Tom Bloor, "Testing the Waters", was a walk through the test frameworks he's developed, and the problems they address.
• Neil Bowers, "The PAUSE Operating Model", was an overview of the guidelines and rules implemented in PAUSE and followed by the PAUSE admins.

Perl 6

• Simon Proctor, "Perl 6: A Whistle-Stop Tour", was what it says on the tin.
• Sue Spence, "Spiders, Gophers, and Butterflies", is about Sue's experience implementing a website crawler in Perl 6 and Go, and comparing concurrency support in both languages.
• JJ Merelo, "Perl6 as a first language", advocates for Perl 6 as a language for teaching complete beginners.

Apps

• Mohammad Anwar, "Creating a tube map in 20 minutes using Map::Tube", introduced Map::Tube and friends, and encouraged the audience to write their own mapping modules.
• Salvador Fandiño, "Packing Perl applications for Windows with Win32::Packer", showed how you can use Win32::Packer to package a Perl application with all of its dependencies, on Windows.

Operations

• JJ Allen, "Perl and Docker, sitting in a tree", is an introduction to using Perl in Docker.
• Lacey Powers, "Debian Tips and Tricks", presented some tips for using and administering Debian.
• JJ Allen, "To delete or not to delete, that is the question" is an introduction to GDPR, and some tips for its implementation, particularly on the right to erasure.

Lightning Talks

You can either watch all the lightning talks in one video, or pick and choose from individual videos:

• Tom Hukins told us how we can safely delete code from large codebases
• Tina Müller talked about the new YAML::PP module she's been working on
• Dave Cross exhorted us to engage beyond the Perl echo chamber, as he always does.
• Mark Keating wants more of us to get involved with the Englightened Perl Organisation.
• Kenichi Ishigaki talked about his new code for detecting what modules are used.
• Paul Johnson shared some Perl optimisation techniques.
• Chris Jack shared some musings about Perl jobs, outsourcing, and contracting.
• Paul Evans pointed out all the things the rest of us got wrong in our slides, and which you should avoid.