martin

Returning from the 27th installment of the German Perl or Perl/Raku Workshop, this time in Munich, I'd like to share some impressions.

A hallmark of German Perl/Raku workshops is that there are no parallel tracks, so that you end up attending a greater variety of talks than if you had to choose tracks. I like that, and consider the three days for the main programme well spent.

Day one

This year had not an officially announced general theme but actually some focus on long-term considerations. So my highlight on day one was Salve's take on the European Cyber Resilience Act and its consequences for Open Source development. I learned that we can do something to help our users getting compliant and hopefully better informed about the software they use.

Salve also brought the CPAN Security Group to my attention, which is an important community effort to respond to security issues with CPAN modules as best as possible.

Topics of other fine talks included a project to introduce school children to programming, a mature service management platform written in Perl, and lots of useful advice for using cloud resources, extending, testing and refactoring code.

Day two

The second day's more serious topic was sustainability for us as a community, with a disussion panel articulating thoughts and encouragement. In a similar spirit, Julien continued his series of talks with practical insight into hiring processes, this time with guidance for taking interns. And yes, you can still hire Perl developers: Maybe Perl is not in their CV but they can adapt to a platform they happen to be confronted with and might come to like it.

This was also the day of my math talk. I experimented and was rather light on Perl code while more heavy on concepts: waving hands, diagrams and even some props acquired from a nearby toy store. This was fun. In other talks I learned a lot about large-scale authentication, comprehensive logging, and email automation.

An XXL lightning talk session, hosted by R Geoffrey "master of thunder and lightning" Avery himself, struck the crowd with 14 topics ranging from using ancient hardware to playlist recommendations and creative (ab)uses of syntax. The final gong then sent us off to the social event in a stylish brewery house.

Day three

The final day had lots of practical topics, starting with digital sound basics as an application of PDL, and sessions about the Rex automation framework, web development with HTMX, Raku tips for Perl programmers, and a visit to the zoo of data formats used by banks, quite possibly processed with help of Perl, as well as new features of Perl 5. I learned that the high-precedence xor operator ^^ now gets an assignment variant and that I somehow must have overlooked when the infix variant had sneaked into the language.

The non-tech topics included a private university's view on programming education and a tutorial on how to run a Perl/Raku workshop, alas without recipients volunteering for immediate application. Thus next year's event is not yet guaranteed to happen.

Conclusion

I found myself amidst a vivid community with some fellows I have known for decades but also some first- and second-timers. It dawned on me that not our technology, alive and kicking if not in the center of mainstream any more, will be the key to challenges free software is facing, but virtues, resilience and sustainability of our community itself.

My thanks go to the organizers, sponsors, speakers, and participants, who make all this happen. I hope we meet again, and again. Meanwhile, let's hack and share some more.