Purdue.pm meeting minutes from 08/30/2000

[Diego Zamboni]

Hi,

Below is what I could reconstruct from my memory about today's meeting. I'm 
sure I missed some things, so please let me know if you notice something 
missing or wrong.

I am very happy with how this meeting turned out. I think this group will be a 
lot of fun.

Cheers,
--Diego

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Minutes for the Purdue.pm meeting of 08/30/2000


This was the first meeting of Purdue.pm, and from what I saw today,
the group shows promise. We had in attendance around 10-15 people,
which is very good for a first meeting.

At first I talked a little bit about what Perl Mongers is, and how
Purdue.pm came into existence. I mentioned the following as possible
activities:

- Talks about different Perl topics
- Social events
- Invite people from the outside to give talks

Other activities suggested include:

- "Lightning talks" in which people have 5 minutes to talk about
  something. These are good for describing some particular construct
  or syntax in Perl, or for explaining some tricky piece of code, or
  for describing a useful module.

- Short courses about different topics. For example, a short
  introductory course to Perl.

- Having a place where people can post problems they have, or
  suggestions for projects, for Purdue.pm members (or anyone else) to
  solve or work on.

Then I mentioned the need for some well-defined roles within
Purdue.pm, such as a Point of Contact and a Web Master. Eric Wright
volunteered to be the web master (web monger?) for the group.

I also mentioned that I have sent invitations to Randal Schwartz and
Tom Phoenix (from Stonehenge Consulting) to come here and give talks
if they are ever nearby (Indianapolis, for example). There is no
guarantee that they will come, but it is a possibility.

Chris Deckard (president of PLUG) mentioned the possibility of
Purdue.pm operating as a PLUG SIG (Special Interest Group). This seems
like a good idea, for the following reasons:

- The memberships of PLUG and Purdue.pm will probably overlap a lot.
- It helps both groups by attracting PLUG people to Purdue.pm and
  vice versa.
- It provides Purdue.pm with some of the infrastructure and
  organization that PLUG already has in place.
- It would give members of Purdue.pm that are also members of PLUG
  access to PLUG's facilities, such as the library, accounts, etc.

Purdue.pm will be the first PLUG SIG, so we will probably have to
figure out more details as we go along.

As for a regular meeting time, PLUG offered to make one Monday a month 
a PLUG/Purdue.pm meeting. The first available Monday seems to be
October 2nd.

The following people volunteered for things to do:

- Eric Weaver: web monger
- Kyle Wright: give a talk about the DBI module
- Addam Schroll: maybe help with the DBI class
- Mark Senn: short course "Introduction to Perl"
- Diego Zamboni: talk about object-oriented Perl

Then, Mark Senn gave a short talk about tricks with the concept of
context in Perl, where he showed how to count the number of times a
string is found in another, how to avoid typing variable names when
you are going to do a lot of operations in a single variable, and some 
other things.

I then described a tricky obfuscated one-liner that returns the length
of the longest key in a hash.

After that, the meeting was officially adjourned, although some of us
hung around to discuss different (and less obfuscated) ways of getting
the length of the longest key in a hash.

If I missed something (quite likely) or grossly misrepresented
something, please let me know.

Cheers,
--Diego Zamboni