[Kc] Meeting Summary: 9/8/03

[Garrett Goebel]

I guess we're not a social lot. As if the mailing list weren't proof of that
;)

Last night's meeting was attended by CJ, Michael Morgan, and myself. CJ
updated us on his CGI::Carp efforts, and we spent most of the evening doing
a code review of one of his scripts.

One of the ideas which came up was to make code reviews a more regular
activity. Though in the past, some people asking for help and hints on the
mailing list have come away wishing they'd had a pair of asbestos
underpants. I can't recall any particularly scathing commentaries myself,
but then again I might have been the culprit, and it may just be that my
threshold for separating emotional and constructive criticism is higher than
average.

So as an alternative to us ripping apart and laying into each others' code,
I suggested that people find particularly useful scripts without burdensome
licenses from places like Matt's Script archive
(http://www.scriptarchive.com/), etc. I figure with our base of Mac, Win32,
and Linux perspectives, differing perl distributions and versions, and the
liberal application of "acceptable" perl style, strict, warnings, tainting,
etc. -We ought to have enough expertise to improve pretty much any code we
put under the kc.pm microscope. We could place the results in our own kc.pm
script archive and/or feed the resulting code back to the original authors.
Any way we chose to do it, I'm sure we'd all learn through the exchange of
ideas. Thoughts?

As for next month's presentation, I was considering doing either a
presentation on Apache::Test or Regular Expressions based on the Mark Jason
Dominus' tutorial which David Nicol mentioned. Anyone have a preference for
one over the other? And does anyone have something that they'd particularly
like to hear about? Or a tool, script, module which they find particularly
interesting or useful?

Another thought was to get together a group of people willing to lead
presentations by adapting chapters from Randal Schwartz' "Learning Perl" and
"Learning Objects, References & Modules". As the books were written with
teaching Perl classes in mind, this shouldn't be too difficult. Such
presentations might well help counter balance the tendency of many kc.pm
regulars (myself included) to wander off into advanced and esoteric topics
with little application to solving everyday problems.

My review of the Safari Bookshelf was used for the Safari "Quote of the
Week". http://www.pm.org/pipermail/kc/2003-July/000125.html. This has netted
us a anniversary coffee mug, which I'll be finding a way to redistribute at
a future meeting. Perhaps someone will help me ressurrect the monthly
puzzle?

Two more things. Michael Morgan's book review of the "Digital Video Pocket
Guide" is going to be featured on the O'Reilly's User Group website
http://ug.oreilly.com. Until it shows up there, you can find it at
http://www.pm.org/pipermail/kc/2003-August/000150.html.

Last, a Perl Job Listings section has been added to the
http://kc.pm.org/jobs.shtml website. This feature was suggested by David
Nicol, and has actually been on the website for some time. -I don't think I
ever got around to announcing it. It is basically a syndicated feed from
http://jobs.perl.org. Ask Bjørn Hansen responded favorably my request to
extend the customizability of the jobs feeds so we can filter down to Kansas
and Missouri listings.

--
Garrett Goebel
IS Development Specialist

ScriptPro                   Direct: 913.403.5261
5828 Reeds Road               Main: 913.384.1008
Mission, KS 66202              Fax: 913.384.2180
www.scriptpro.com          garrett at scriptpro dot com
 
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