It's almost two weeks since our first MiltonKeynes.pm technical meeting and I've finally got round to putting the slides on our Web page.
We got a respectable attendance: ten people showed up including the four speakers. The speakers covered a good variety of topics from Nik's talk about Testing Legacy Code, using clever tricks like overriding CORE::GLOBAL from within modules to affect how scripts run, through Dave's Databases and Perl, covering DBI and Class::DBI with good explanations of problems you might encounter, and my Gathering information from the Web with WWW::Mechanize to Rod's talk (no slides) about using Perl to tie together a variety of large systems.
The range of talks did justice to Perl's versatility and power: you can override its internals, hook into databases and Web sites easily, or use it as the Internet's duct tape with a few convenient scripts.
It's funny how time flies: tomorrow we're off to the pub again.
For a small city, not known for its computing industry, we're doing well enough to provoke London.pm into holding a long overdue technical meeting. In a moment of weakness, Dean persuaded me to talk at that, too.
So I gave a lightning talk on Tracing Code with Aspect.pm which Dominic Mitchell has summarised well. From the other talks, I learned a bit about OCaml and JSON both of which have lingered on my things to learn about list for too long.
This evening, I found myself fixing a Postfix installation on a Fedora box using yum. I've used none of these before, but still managed to get everything working. I didn't do this out of the goodness of my heart, though: I did it to guilt trip Robbie into talking about how he uses Perl to run a multiplayer game in his spare time at the next MiltonKeynes.pm technical meeting. Watch this space.
