Last Saturday was the London Perl Workshop and (as has become traditional), I’m going to tell you how much fun it was so that you feel jealous that you missed it and make more of an effort to come along next year.

This year was slightly different for me. For various reasons, I didn’t have the time to propose and prepare any talks for the workshop so (for the first time ever) I decided I’d just go to the workshop and not give any talks. It very nearly worked too.

I arrived at about 9am, checked in at the registration desk and collected my free t-shirt. Then I went upstairs to the main lecture theatre to see Julian giving the organisers’ welcome talk. Julian is a new member of the organising committee, having only moved to London in the last year. But he’s certainly thrown himself into the community.

Following the welcome talk, I stayed in the main room to hear Léon Brocard explaining what’s new in the world of HTTP. It seems the HTTP3 is just around the corner and while it’s a lot more complicated than previous versions it has the potential to make the web a lot faster. I stayed in the same room to hear Martin Berends talking about Cucumber. I’ve been meaning to look at Cucumber in more detail for some years – perhaps this talk will be the prod I need.

Things were running a little late in the main room by this point, so I was a little late getting to Simon Proctor‘s 24 uses for Perl6‎. I try to get to at least one Perl 6 talk at every conference I go to. And this time, I was galvanised enough to buy a copy of Learning Perl 6 for my Kindle.

I caught up with a few friends over the coffee break and then headed back to the main room to see Saif Ahmed explaining Quick and Dirty GUI Applications (and why you should make them)‎. This was nostalgic for me. Almost twenty years ago at an OSCON in California, I remember a long, drunken night when some of us sketched out a plan to build a framework-agnostic GUI toolkit for Perl (like a DBI for GUIs). I think we gave up when we realised we would need to call it “PUI”. Anyway, it seems that Saif (who was keen to make it very clear that he’s not a professional programmer) has written such a tool.

After that I went to see my former colleague Andrew Solomon talking about ‎HOWTO: grow the Perl team‎. The talk was based around his experiences helping various companies training up Perl programmers using his Geek Uni site.

And then it was lunchtime. I met up with a few other former London Perl Mongers leaders and we had some very nice pizzas just over the road from the workshop venue. Over lunch, we claimed to be preparing for our afternoon panel discussion – but really we were mainly just reminiscing.

After lunch, it was back to the main room to see Peter Allan’s talk on Security Checks using perlcritic‎ and Tom Hukins on Contrarian Perl‎. Both talks were the kind of thing that really makes you think. Peter’s talk introduced some interesting ideas about pushing perlcritic further than it is usually pushed. And Tom pointed out that in order to write the best code possible, you might need to move beyond the generally accepted “industry standards”.

After that, there was a brief visit to a different room to hear Mohammed Anwar talking about The power of mentoring‎. Mohammed is another recent newcomer to the Perl community and, like Julien, he is certainly making a difference.

I skipped the coffee break and went back to the main room to prepare for the one session that I had been roped into contributing to – ‎”I’m a Former London.PM Leader – Ask Me Anything”‎. We had gathered together as many of the former London Perl Mongers leaders and we took questions from the audience about the past, present and future of the group. I was slightly worried that it might tip over into nostalgic self-indulgence, but several people later told me that they had really enjoyed it.

Then it was time for the lightning talks (which were as varied and entertaining as always) and Julien’s “thank-you” talk. Like last year, the post-conference started in the venue before moving on to a pub. I stayed for an hour or so, chatting to friends, before making my way home.

As always, I’d like to thank all of the organisers, speakers, sponsors and attendees for making the workshop as successful as it (always!) is.

Here’s a list of those sponsors. They’re nice companies:

Hope to see you at next years workshop.

Also published on Medium.