(Photo by Mark Keating)

Last Saturday was the annual London Perl Workshop. And, as always, it was a great opportunity to soak up the generosity, good humour and all-round-awesomeness of the European Perl community. I say “European” as the LPW doesn’t just get visitors from London or the UK. There are many people who attend regularly from all over Europe. And, actually, from further afield – there are usually two or three Americans there.

I arrived at about twenty to nine, which gave me just enough time to register and say hello to a couple of people before heading to the main room for Mark Keating’s welcome. Mark hinted that with next year’s workshop being the tenth that he will have organised, he is starting to wonder if it’s time for someone else to take over. More on that later.

I then had a quick dash back down to the basement where I was running a course on Modern Web Development with Perl. It seemed to go well, people seemed engaged and asked some interesting questions. Oh, and my timing was spot on to let my class out two minutes early so that they were at the front of the queue for the free cakes (courtesy of Exonetric). That’s just my little trick for getting slightly higher marks in the feedback survey.

After the coffee break I was in the smaller lecture theatre for three interesting talks – Neil Bowers on ‎Boosting community engagement with CPAN‎ (and, yes, I’ve finally got round to signing up for the CPAN Pull Request Challenge), Smylers on Code Interface Mistakes to Avoid‎ and Neil Bowers (again) on ‎Dependencies and the River of CPAN‎ which was an interesting discussion on how the way you maintain a CPAN module should change as it becomes more important to more people.

Then it was lunch, which I spent in the University cafeteria catching up with friends.

After lunch, I saw Léon Brocard on Making your website seem faster‎, followed by Steve’s Man Publishing Pint‎, which turned out to be about publishing ebooks to Amazon easily – something which I’ve been very interested in recently.

The schedule was in a bit of a state of flux, so I missed Andrew Solomon’s talk on How to grow a Perl team‎ and instead saw Steve Mynott talking about Perl 6 Grammars‎. Following that, I gave my talk on Conference Driven Publishing (which is part apology for not writing the book I promised to write at the last LPW and part attempt to get more people writing and publishing ebooks about Perl).

Then there was another coffee break which I spent getting all the latest gossip from some former colleagues. We got so caught up in it that I was slightly late for Theo van Hoesel’s talk Dancer2 REST assured‎. I like Theo’s ideas but (as I’ve told him face to face) I would like to see a far simpler interface.

Next up was the keynote. Liz Mattijsen stood in for Jonathan Worthington (who had to cancel at the last minute) and she explained the history of her involvement in Perl and how she was drawn to working on Perl 6. She finished with a brief overview of some interesting Perl 6 features.

Then there were the lightning talks which were their usual mixture of useful, thought-provoking and insane.

Mark Keating closed the conference by thanking everyone for their work, their sponsorship and their attendance. He returned to the theme of perhaps passing on the organisation of the workshop to someone new. No-one, I think, can fail to be incredibly grateful for the effort that Mark has put into organising the last nine workshops and it makes complete sense to me that he can’t maintain that level of effort forever. So it makes sense to start looking for someone else to take over organising the workshop in the future. And, given the complexity of the task, it would be sensible if that person got involved as soon as possible so that we could have a smooth transition during the organisation of next year’s event.

If you’re interested in becoming a major hero to the European Perl community, then please get in touch with Mark.

There was no planned post-workshop event this year. So we broke up into smaller groups and probably colonised most of central London. Personally, I gathered a few friends and wandered off to my favourite restaurant in Chinatown.

I can only repeat what Mark said as he closed the workshop and give my thanks to all of the organisers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors and attendees. There’s little doubt in my mind that the LPW is, year after year, one of the best grass-roots-organised events in the European geek calendar. And this year’s was as good as any.