[AnnArbor.pm] [A2PM] Interest in meetings?

[Michael Mol]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 2:06 PM, David Hand <cogent at slashdot.org> wrote:
> I agree that we'd do well to have social meetings in addition to
> technical meetings.  There are many different types of Perl Mongers
> groups:  At one extreme, the Seattle Perl Mongers (now apparently
> called the Seattle Perl Users Group) describes itself as an
> "Educational Cooperative".  At the other extreme, the New York Perl
> Mongers discourages much Perl discussion on its mailing list and
> mostly just meets in a bar near NYU.  I've learned a hell of a lot of
> Perl over beers at the Peculier Pub.  :-)
>
> Anyway, I'd certainly attend a social meeting, and so would a couple
> of my co-workers at Slashdot.  That said, I'd also attend a technical
> meeting.  (I'd also like to get back in the habit of presenting.)
>
> Michael's "anchor" idea seems to be a good one, especially in
> combination with some sort of semi-regular technical meeting.  Or
> maybe it'd be sufficient if there were a regular venue at which we
> could host technical meetings, so that the "anchor" wouldn't have to
> provide one of his own?

When I was anchor, it wasn't necessarily a matter of me having
something to present. It was more a matter of me being there, someone
who people could ask questions of, bounce ideas off of, or just be
generally social. Sure, I brought along my digital camera, laptop and
a couple other electronic gadgets so I could say "here's how you can
use $cool_gadget under Linux", but I pretty much never needed them.
Usually, it'd be enough for me to ask individuals, "What do you do?
What have you been poking at in the last week?" followed by "I thought
that worked like this." or "Neat. I've been thinking about messing
with that." It keeps the conversations open and the topic of
conversation wide-ranging and random.

If you were to ask me a question like that at a Perl-flavored social
meeting, I might chat a bit about what I understand of Perl 6, and my
ideas for building an implementation in C++ with a little bit of JIT
and OpenCL magic thrown in. Or about the guy I know who's working on
package repository containing code which translates automatically into
Perl, Python and a few other languages. Or I might turn around and ask
questions about different object models in Perl, and the differences
between, e.g. ActiveState Perl and the stuff that comes out of the
Debian repos. Or idly chat about what a functioning lolspeak
equivalent to Lingua::Romana::Perligata would be.

--
:wq