What can I say except "Wow"? I had a great time tonight.
While we were waiting for more folks to show up, we sat around chatting about various things: a Perl/Tk app to view and/or edit POD, what use we have for Perl where we work, the whole PHP vs Perl thing, etc. It was very interesting.
I am disappointed about the turn out. I had hoped for forty or more people to show up. I expected about twenty to actually be there. In the end, we had about 10 not counting the Metallect folks, brian, Colin and myself.
Tom Hite spoke about Metallect's solution prior to brian speaking. They had an interesting iPod offer too. Contact them for details.
As announced, brian spoke on Module::Release in a manner that you don't often see at Perl Mongers meetings; we didn't see any code until the very tail end! He mainly spoke about the various reasons that the module exists but also mentioned the changes that have been made, the future plans for it. Yes, he even touched on usage towards the end.
Why does it exist? To automate the tasks associated with releasing software. Duh! That was an easy one, right? But seriously, he covered things that I would not have even tied into the process.
He had numerous real world examples of things that can (and do) happen at the various stages to make things go awry when we try to do it ourselves.
Okay, I can't do justice for brian's humor by trying to describe it. (I'm probably not doing justice for his talk in general either. Sorry brian!) I'll simply leave it at this: he's a funny guy.
At the end was an extremely brief question and answer session. Not because brian cut it short but simply due to a lack of questions. An interesting little tidbit** popped out during this session too.
After the meeting, we all hung out for a short while chatting about whatever. brian handed out a book ("We the Media", if I remember correctly) to the person who traveled the furthest to be there. Tommy Butler won coming in from Arlington. brian was also handing out copies of The Perl Review to anyone who wanted one.
We settled upon Nedley's for dinner. During and after which we talked about various things from Metallect's solution to "roadside bombs in Iraq & how they really are not as bad as the media makes them out to be" [quotes added for topic clarity and not to actually quote anyone] to the Olympics to well, you get the picture.
Lots of laughs (as well as trade talk) were shared. I'm fairly certain that everyone in attendance had a great time. I will definitely be inviting brian again.
** - Patrick Michaud, a relatively new addition to the group and the new Perl 6 compiler pumpking, was in attendance and has offered to speak next month!
