Another excellent london.pm technical meeting

Another excellent london.pm technical meeting last night.

I tried out my "Why Perl Advocacy is a Bad Idea" lightning talk. It still needs some work. Concensus is that it needs to be more shouty!

Mark Fowler gave two lightning talks for the price of one. The first was about how he's using TT2 Views to create a web page for our NMS (Not Matt's Scripts) project. The second was about the progress of that project. It seems to be coming on very well.

Robin talked about Mutagenic Modules - which was full of Robin's usual inspired madness. And made me rethink my TPC paper a bit. When Robin posted the slides to the list this morning, Simon Cozens mentioned that he'd been working on a similar (but different) idea. Turns out that MJD's "You can't just make up any old shit and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!" line might not be true for much longer :)

Jo gave a talk on Tangram - using a very interesting presentational style. And to finish off, Alex generated some more music for us.

It all went a bit weird

It all went a bit weird here last night.

To explain, that messageboard is aimed at readers of Liz Castro's book "Perl & CGI for the World Wide Web - A Visual Quickstart Guide". Of all of the "non-programmer" Perl/CGI books, that one is probably the best. It's far from perfect, but the second edition is going to be much better.

I've been hanging around the messageboard for a few weeks now and it's clear that I know far more Perl than the majority of the people there. I've been answering people's problems and gently trying to steer them towards better Perl habits. This has obviously been winding up a couple of the existing "experts" there.

Last night it all got too much an one of them had a bit of a go at me. By trying to defend my actions I only made it worse, leading to this very amusing thread.

Various london.pm members waded in and it all got very silly.

Think I'll lie low for a while :)

Iterative meeting yesterday afternoon

Iterative meeting yesterday afternoon. Everyone seemed a bit depressed when I arrived. I think they were on the verge of jacking it all in. Seemed happier three hours later. We have a short-term plan and we started to thrash out an "Effective Perl Programming" training course. We even have another potential product - code reviews.

Last night there was a London.pm meeting at the Anchor. Those meetings are getting very strange. I used to know everyone who turned up to them, but we're getting so many new members that I can't keep up.

Retook the Brainbench Perl test this morning. Scored 4.76 which puts me back on top in London and second (behind Piers) in the UK. That's got to look good on the marketing literature hasn't it?