All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Things I learned at Twin City Perl Workshop 2008

domm on 2008-11-12T17:55:18

Last weekend has seen the first Perl workshop held in two capital cities. Organising it was fun, though I have to admit that I slacked quite a lot and thus most of the work was done by Maros, Pepl (on the Viennese side) and Jozef, Emmanuel and Martin (the Bratislava team).

Things I learned:

  • A/B Testing sound like a very good idea.
  • I should take a look at NYTProf.
  • Check if your laptop works with the projector! Especially if you have a new laptop (like me) that never was connected to a projector before...
  • Check if your images are in the correct resolution. Some jokes of Maros' talk were killed by this ("Do you want to play thermonuclear war?")
  • Another interesting thing to take a look at: D-Bus
  • XML and XLST are still not dead (or as pepl said: "This is the first Perl conference where XLST is mentioned in more than two talks" (excluding his :-)
  • I should try to build a GUI for some of my scripts. But should I use GTK2 or Wx?
  • It's quite easy to find nasty bugs in Rakudo, but very hard to put them into a testcase that still fails...
  • Cat-herding people gets easier the more often you do it.
  • Buying 19 regular and 4 discount train tickets to Bratislava and handing them out to the right people (who all showed up on time) was easier than expected.
  • I probably won't get nearer to "Indiana Jones"-like stuff than during Tara's talk.
  • Do not recompile your kernel to get the projector to work (5 minutes before your talk..) (In fact I learned that years ago, but some people still like to mock me..)
  • There were more Perl hackers in Bratislava than expected. Which is great!

Things I still have to learn

  • Don't write your talk at the party before the conference.
  • Set up wpa-supplicant WLAN on my laptop.
  • How to host a proper auction.

So, to sum it up, Twin City Perl Workshop was a very nice event with great talks and interesting attendees. I'm very much looking forward to do something similar next year. To bad I couldn't make it to the hackathon at Jonathans place

You can find photos on flickr tagged as 'tcpw2008'. And we're currently trying to get links to all the presentations...

I should try to build a GUI for some of my scripts

Alias on 2008-11-12T23:37:57

If you can, go with Wx.

The main advantage is that it is easily installable on all three main desktop operating systems as a dependency (unlike Gtk) and that Wx "looks like a real application" on all three main desktop applications.

Re:I should try to build a GUI for some of my scri

gabor on 2008-11-14T12:08:48

If you mean Windows 2000, XP and Vista then maybe yes, thanks to Strawberry Perl but I see people struggle with Wx on both Linux and even more on Mac.

On the bright side it will be all smooth in a few months as the new releases of the various Linux distributions start to distribute Padre and the wx stack with it.

Re:I should try to build a GUI for some of my scri

jozef on 2008-11-17T08:33:58

Debian Lenny (current testing) includes libwx-perl package. On the other hand the libgtk-perl is already in Debian Etch (current stable).

XML/XSLT

Aristotle on 2008-11-13T11:06:11

Well, I for one hope they never die! They’re far too useful. Just because XML has been used by the clueless as a hammer for every problem they encounter does not make it a bad idea when used correctly; and the XSLT model (albeit not syntax) is elegant to an extent I have rarely encountered elsewhere.

My main weblog is produced by XSLT processing a single XML file, and despite the tons of small features I have added to the transforms over the years, I still find them completely straightforward and easy to modify, despite having refactored any substantial portion of them only twice.