[Melbourne-pm] Meeting - Wednesday the 12th of September 2012

[Robert Norris]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2012 at 1:40 PM, Alfie John <alfiej at opera.com> wrote:
> Rob Norris is back from Oslo via YAPC::Europe (Frankfurt). While still
> jet lagged, I've managed to convince him to give a talk for next month's
> Perl Mongers. I don't have the details yet on what Rob will talk about,
> but he'll give an update to the list soon.

I don't have details either! I've got a couple of weeks for
preparation though so there's a few things I could talk about. Let me
know what interests you, because I'd much rather talk about something
is interesting or relevant to you. Also I throw in a giant caveat here
that I'm not really an expert on anything, but hopefully it can be
enough to get some discussion going.

As mentioned, I went to YAPC::Europe. It was a blast, and if you ever
get the opportunity to go I encourage you to do it. Obviously I didn't
go to everything, but feel free to take a look at the schedule[1] and
if you find something there that you'd like to hear about I can give
it a try. Or I could just to be a bit of a general "what it was like"
thing.

A talk I've been thinking about is something to show how we manage our
servers here at Opera (or at least in the Mail Services group, which
is what the Melbourne office does). We use Perl heavily, and have some
rather unique stuff in place that makes it possible to perform complex
tasks across all servers in a matter of minutes. This talk would be
more sysadmin, with some Perl around the edges. I promise a good time
though :)

There's also some bits and pieces of Perl stuff that I've been playing
with lately that I could try to flesh out into a full talk:
 - writing a webapp with PSGI/Plack
 - 3D rendering engines
 - Enterprise SSO with SAML (and showing off XML::Spice, my XML
generation module)

And if you want to go completely non-Perl, I can talk about my game,
Pioneer Space Sim[2] and what its like to write C++ and Lua when
you're a Perl programmer at heart. There's also a related talk in
there about managing an open-source project with GitHub.

Or you can put up your own talk. Then you don't have to listen to me :)

Cheers,
Rob.

1. http://act.yapc.eu/ye2012/schedule
2. http://pioneerspacesim.net/