SPUG: Last night's meeting

Andrew Sweger andrew at sweger.net
Wed Mar 17 11:50:03 CST 2004


We had a full house at last night's meeting at Peter Darley's office. A
big thank you to Peter and Kinesis[1] for sponsoring us this month.

I really enjoyed getting to show folks a few basic uses of the perl
debugger, despite the small screen I used. (Sorry about that, folks.) I
was only able to make a feeble attempt at showing what ddd can do, but it
seems there's a difference between the ddd I was running and the Perl 5.8
debugger interface it appeared to be talking to (rather than interfacing
the debugger API directly). I also gave a short demonstration of the new
Affrus[2] perl debugger from Late Night Software[3] which works with both
Perl 5.6 and 5.8 (but only available for Mac OS X so far). I would enjoy
doing it again, maybe with a *real* bug in someone's code that needs
hunting. It might make a fun spug-hack topic sometime. Condemn all debug
print statements now!

[1] - http://kinesis-cem.com/
[2] - http://www.latenightsw.com/affrus/
[3] - http://www.latenightsw.com/

In the latter portion of the meeting, Michael led us on a round of
spontaneous lightning talks. I thought it was very effective and reminded
me of the regular get togethers with other programmers at jobs past. It's
one thing to post a question to a mailing list (or -gasp- usenet), but
it's even better in person to hear about one person's challenge and see
the ideas pop up around the room like lightning striking. Okay, that's a
little too fantastic I guess. But you get the idea.

At the end of the meeting, we turned to the topic of our next meeting.
Despite the success of last night's meeting, we need a bigger place to
meet. I forget the gentleman's name who suggested it, but here's a great
idea: survey the spug-list to learn who the most represented employers
are, then (professionally) ask those companies if they would sponsor SPUG
for meeting space. It shouldn't hurt to ask, many companies benefit from
using Perl, and what's good for SPUG is good for all Seattle area Perl
programmers. I think this is a great idea. I'm willing to oversee this.  
I'll follow up with another post for a survey thread (in case folks
stopped reading several paragraphs above).

-- 
Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
                                things can go wrong at once.







More information about the spug-list mailing list