(Photo above by Chris Jack)

Last Saturday was the annual London Perl Workshop. I should write up what happened before I forget it all.

I arrived at about 8:30 in the morning and was able to check in quickly – collecting a bit of swag which included a free t-shirt as I was a speaker. I then made my way up to the main lecture theatre in order to see Katherine Spice welcoming people to the day on behalf of the new team of organisers. After that headed off to the smaller lecture theatre to set up for my tutorial. There were a few differences from previous years. Firstly, I was giving a completely Perl-free tutorial (about on-page SEO techniques) and secondly, I had been moved out of the tutorial track and into one of the main talk tracks. As a side effect of that second change, I was also asked to trim my talk from my usual two hours to a more “talk-like” eighty minutes.

The talk seemed to go well. I got some interesting questions and a few people came up to me later in the day to tell me they had found it interesting useful (sometimes both!) The slides to the talk are available on SlideShare: Web Site Tune-Up – Improve Your Googlejuice.

Following that, I had time to see one talk before the coffee break and I chose Why learning a bit of Crypto is good for you‎ by Colin Newell. Colin gave a good (if, necessarily rather shallow) explanation of how learning a small amount of cryptography can help you improve the security of your systems.

Then it was was the morning coffee break. For the past few years, this break has traditionally included cakes which were supplied by a sponsor. When that didn’t look like happening this year, organiser Neil Bowers (with a gentle nudge from Leon Timmermans) came up with the idea of a community bake. And that’s what happened. A number of attendees baked cakes for us all. I had one of Neil’s blueberry muffins and it was lovely.

There was a slight change in the schedule after the coffee break. Matt Trout was unable to be at the workshop so, at the last minute, JJ Allen stepped in and gave his talk To delete or not to delete, that is the question‎, which was about some impending data protection laws which will affect all businesses. I stayed in the same room to see Neil Bowers explain The PAUSE Operating Model‎ and then JJ returned to talk about something completely different – Perl and Docker, sitting in a tree‎. JJ’s company, Opus VL, have released some of their Docker infrastructure code to CPAN and I’m sure many people will find it useful.

Then it was lunchtime. I bought a sandwich from the university’s cafe and sat in the foyer talking to various friends who walked past.

I started the afternoon watching Paul Evans on ‎Devel::MAT updated‎. Devel::MAT is a development tool which aims to do for memory analysis what Devel::NYTProf does for profiling. It looks very useful. That was followed by Julien Fieggehenn’s talk Turning humans into developers with Perl‎. Julien doesn’t just train people in Perl, he acts as a mentor for them for a couple of months when they join his company, so he was able to talk in some detail about much wider issues than just choosing which topics to cover in a training course.

Talking about wider issues, I then saw Tom Hukins’ talk Development: More than Writing Code?‎ Tom is, of course, right that there’s more to being a good developer than just writing good code. This is a topic that I’m thinking of developing a training course on. Tom was followed by Paul Johnson giving good advice on ‎Modernising A Legacy Perl Application.

The afternoon coffee break included some professionally baked pastries. They were also lovely, but don’t think they were appreciated quite as much as the morning’s community versions.

After the coffee break, we all gathered in the main lecture theatre for the plenary session. Ann Barcomb spoke about Fifteen Years of Contributing Casually‎. Ann was once a Perl developer. I first met her at the first YAPC::Europe in London in 2000 and she was then part of the organising team for the second YAPC::Europe in Amsterdam in 2001. But since then she has become a researcher into the sociology of the open source movement. You can read a lot of her research on her web site. Her talk illustrated her findings with some personal anecdotes about her own casual contributions to the Perl community. Everyone seemed to find it fascinating and the Q&A at the end of the talk showed every signs of turning into a full-scale discussion. On a personal level, it was great to catch up with Ann again about fifteen years after we had been in the same room together.

And then there were the lightning talks. They were their usual mixture of intriguing and entertaining. Mark Keating (enjoying his first LPW that he wasn’t organising) implored us to get involved in the Enlightened Perl Organisation. I announced a plan to publish more Perl books (of which, more later). I was particularly impressed by Kenichi Ishigaki who flew in from Japan just to give a lightning talk about his module Perl::PrereqScanner::NotQuiteLite.

After that, there were a few closing words from Neil Bowers and, in another innovation brought in by the new organisers, drinks were served on site rather than in a local pub. Of course, some people went off to a local pub after that as well.

As always, it was a great day. The new organising team seem to have hit the ground running and produced an impressive workshop. My thanks to the organisers, the volunteers, the speakers, the sponsors and all of the attendees.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s workshop.

Also published on Medium.