We held our third technical Perl Mongers meeting this evening. I enjoyed it and learned things. Great! I suspect I'll put the slides on our web site once I've caught up with some sleep.
Lee started out by telling us how he uses Perl in his work as a bioinformatician. Nik noticed that anti-spam code uses some of the techniques he described, which made me think a little about evolution and spammers. Lee had very detailed slides that supported his talk well.
Robbie told us about the fun and pitfalls of running an online game. He explained how he used HTML::Template to let players customise their in-game views; he told us how he used .htaccess files to protect Wikis and forums from spam. But best of all he showed us logs of what happens if you s/\bgay\b/hard/ on a messaging system used by frustrated teenagers.
Then we took a quick break to chat to each other before I waffled about things I learned at YAPC:Europe. Well, some of them, at least. I forgot to mention the Chartreuse and making people miss their flights home.
Finally, Nik gave us a great introduction to SVK. Unfortunately, my clever idea of him pulling out the network cable to work offline couldn't happen as he had an SSH connection open to the machine at the other end of the cable. By now I should have learned that my clever plans don't work.
But we had fun. And I guess it's more or less our first birthday now as a Perl Mongers group. I'm still surprised we can draw this kind of audience for Perl in Milton Keynes, but really pleased that our group does so well.
And as Jonas says, "MiltonKeynes.pm sounds more like a solicitors firm than any other Perl Monger group." I choose to take that as praise..
Fancy doing your YAPC::Europe experiences (including Chartreuse
