Recently in Conferences Category

The schedule for YAPC::NA just got published, and there's plenty of good stuff this year. If you haven't decided to make the trip out to Chicago June 16-18 yet, this should help.

Cool stuff that jumps out at me as I peruse the grid: JT Smith talking about the premade application stack that WebGUI uses, Schwern on testing data with The Sims, and Kevin Falcone on timezone handling.

For the beginners, Kent Cowgill's intro to testing is a great way to get introduced to the topic, and I'm sure that Leonard Miller talking about Perl::Tidy and Perl::Critic will help instill good coding practices.

New this year, on Wednesday there will be workshops. Stevan Little will host a 2-hour Moose tutorial, and Jim Keenan will help you get started building and working with Parrot and Rakudo Perl.

Do you have recommendations on must-see talks? Let your fellow Perlbuzz readers know in the comments below.

Plain Black has announced the WebGUI Users Conference this summer in Madison, WI. WebGUI is a GPLed CMS written in Perl with thousands of customers around the world, and gets 5,000 downloads each day.

The schedule for OSCON 2008 has just been announced, and the Perl track is back with a vengeance. Last year, our favorite language seemed to be falling out of favor with five tutorials and nine sessions. This year, it's five tutorials and fifteen sessions. Tim Bunce's DashProfiler and Eric Wilhelm's Stick a fork() in It: Parallel and Distributed Perl are the two that jump out at me.

I won't be speaking about Perl. Instead, I'll be talking about Just enough C for open source projects and part of Michael Schwern's tutorial-length People For Geeks extravaganza.

The Call For Papers for YAPC::EU 2008 is now open. The theme for this year pleases me: "Beautiful Perl."

The Portuguese Perl Workshop is also calling for papers.

Finally, does any read these call for paper announcements? I feel redundant to use.perl.org on this score, and have nothing additional to add other than "Hey, here's a link." I will drop coverage of them unless I hear otherwise.

USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Organization, has announced:

USENIX is pleased to announce open public access to all its conference proceedings.

This significant decision will allow universal access to some of the most important technical research in advanced computing. In making this move USENIX is setting the standard for open access to information, an essential part of its mission.

USENIX could not achieve such goals without the support and dedication of its membership. We urge you to encourage others to join USENIX. Membership helps us present over 20 influential conferences each year and offer open access to the technical information presented there.

The proceedings are available at http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/

Dave Rolsky has written up a recap of Frozen Perl from the organizers' point of view. Some interesting tidbits:

• 2/3rds of FP2008 expenses were paid by sponsors, keeping attendee cost low
• Some sponsors are interested in the tax deduction; some see it as a marketing expense
• With very low ticket prices, each additional attendee ends up being a net loss
• A potential solution to the lightning talk machine dance could be a KVM.
• Income $7,190 - Expenses $6,213.43 = $976.57 overage

The workshop came together beautifully. I was very impressed with what Dave & Co. pulled together.

Hooray for spreading the word! Patrick Michaud impressed this attendee at FOSDEM with his talk about Parrot and Rakudo Perl.

The next talk was about Perl 6. Patrick Michaud was a good speaker, and he could convey his enthousiasm about the (many) novelties of Perl 6 as opposed to 5. He also quickly described what they used for their implementation of Perl 6, Rakudo Perl: the Parrot virtual machine. This seemingly allows you to put together your dynamic language in about 4 hours. Might pick up Perl again sometime. (Emphasis mine -- Andy)

This kind of PR is invaluable as we pass the tipping point to getting Perl 6 and Rakudo Perl out the door. Thanks, Patrick.

Addendum: Here's some more good stuff reported:

The talk about Perl 6 was the most interesting for me. I didn’t really like Perl <5 primarily because of having too many ways to do the same in exactly the same way but with a different syntax. I knew that Perl 6 was a total and backwards incompatible redesign of the language, build on top of a generic and good virtual machine called Parrot. Parrot, which I hadn’t given a proper look yet, turned out to be a lot greater than expected. You write support for a new language in Parrot by writing in a subset of Perl 6, which with it’s new Regular Expressions and specializations (tokens: regex without backtracking, etc), was looking very suited for it.

Except for all the new syntactic very very sweet sugar (on which I won’t (yet) elaborate) they added in Perl 6, the greatest one (which is actually more of a Parrot thing) is being able to extend Perl during runtime: writing new parser rules. One application is being able to define ‘!’ as a faculty operator. I’m itching to play with it.

YAPC::Asia is fast approaching (May 15-16) as is the deadline for talk submissions, just a week away. Interestingly enough, they're accepting JavaScript talks as well as Perl. I like some good homogenization of the communities! Details at http://yapcasia.org/.

The fourth Italian Perl Workshop will be September 18th and 19th in Pisa. Organizers are calling for talks, but haven't yet set up the website.

Josh McAdams has announced the open call for participation for YAPC::NA in Chicago, June 16-18th, 2008. Talks can be 20, 45, 70 or 95 minutes long, plus the call for lightning talks will open later. The YAPC::NA website has details.

Across the Atlantic in Braga, Portugal, José Alves de Castro has announced the call for participation for the Portuguese Perl Workshop 2008, June 6 & 7th.

Peter Scott sent in this call for participation for OSCON 2008.

O'Reilly Media has announced their Open Source Conference Call for Participation. OSCON, which started as The Perl Conference in 1997, hosts the 12th annual Perl Conference this year. The OSCON Perl track review committee invites presenters to submit proposals for talks about the great things they've been doing with Perl. Make their job hard!

This will be the breakout year for Perl 6 (maybe this is the Christmas???), and we will feature it at OSCON. We don't assume that we already know everyone who's got a Perl 6 talk for us; if you've got something interesting to tell people about Perl 6, submit a proposal.

We are equally interested in Perl 5 presentations. This has been an exciting year for Perl 5: the Perl 5 Porters released Perl 5.10; perlbuzz readers recently heard all about Strawberry Perl; and Moose, a new object system for Perl 5, is gaining in popularity. We continue to hear stories about how Perl has saved jobs and money, and made work fun. Let's see your presentations on enterprise-scale Perl applications and infrastructure, and the coolest modules, hacks, and techniques for using Perl for Stuff That Matters.

There's something special about the Perl community, and you can see it at OSCON thanks in no small part to the excellent presenters who turn out for it each year... so join them in 2008! See http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/cfp/13 for essential advice on submitting your proposal. The deadline is February 4, so start working on those proposals now!

Peter Scott wrote Perl Medic and Perl Debugged and is a Perl trainer. He's presented at the Perl Whirl, YAPC, and OSCON, for which this year he is on the Perl track review committee.