Last Thursday, Milton Keynes Perl Mongers held our second technical meeting of the year. How organised of us!
We had a typically varied, interesting set of talks, reflecting the different things we use Perl for.
Colin Bradford told us more about how Lovefilm used memcached to scale their popular Perl Web applications for hundreds of thousands of users. Colin gave some interesting suggestions based on hard won experience. My favourite tip was "avoid using methods called 'set' and 'get' because you will mistype them and fail to spot mistakes in code reviews. Use 'store' and 'retrieve' instead."
Tony Edwardson gave a brief introduction to Moose, which proved useful for our attendees who aren't die hard Perl developers, and offered a good overview for those of us who haven't done much with Moose yet.
I showed how developers can use CPAN's toolchain to develop and distribute their own private code. I chose not to use slides, and went for the live demo option which fortunately went fine.
Finally, Peter Edwards told us about using WxWidgets to develop cross platform GUI applications in Perl. The Padre Perl IDE has recently made this more popular: Peter told us about an older application he supports. I liked that he told us about supporting tools that might life easier without language bigotry: some of the most useful Wx tools are written in Python.
Unfortunately our meeting clashed with the London Perl Mongers' technical meeting, which affected a few people who wanted to attend both. Still, I consider this a good problem to have: We have several active Perl groups in England meeting regularly.
I'm currently organising our next set of talks some time in July. Please let me know if you would like to present a talk, or keep an eye on our Web site, mailing list or IRC channel if you would like to attend.
