[pgh-pm] thoughts on future talks

Chris Winters chris.winters at gmail.com
Thu Nov 17 10:42:00 PST 2005


Over beer and pool at the last meeting, Dan brought up how we're kind
of in a static mode where generally the same people show up and talk
to each other about new stuff they're doing. That's not such a bad
thing, but I think one of Dan's points is that we can do more.

I know that I tend to think only about talks on projects I've done.
But since I talk about things I like (abstraction, patterns), and I've
been coding Perl for a while, you need some Perl under your belt to
follow along. That's not doing much for people who don't know Perl
that well or who might be interested in learning more.

So maybe we should do more talks on simple, straightforward stuff, like:

 - Using dates and times
 - Accessing databases
 - Using a templating engine
 - Scraping the web for interesting data
 - Calling remote systems with foo messaging system (XML-RPC, SOAP, ...)
 - Manipulating external programs/program data (excel spreadsheets,
PDF files...)
 - Benchmarking
 - Little scripts that should be in your toolbox
 - Object-oriented perl

Some of them have been done before, but maybe we can refer to those as
"classic hits" instead of "retreads" :-)

Just a thought.

Chris


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