[San-Diego-pm] Meeting Recap

Chris Grau chris at chrisgrau.com
Thu Jul 17 15:32:26 PDT 2008


In the spirit of better late than never, here is the recap from the June
meeting.  I'd like to note that I did get this out before the July
meeting.  Enjoy!

=head1 NAME

SanDiego::Meeting::Social - social gathering of the San Diego Perl
Mongers

=head1 DATE

Thursday, 19 June 2008, 19:00 - 21:00

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This is a simple meeting recap, conveniently written in pod so everyone
can read it in whatever format they prefer.  If you lack an appropriate
formatter, well, you can always write one.  As an added bonus, if you're
using a decent MUA *cough*Mutt*cough*, a formatter is only a few
keystrokes away:

    macro pager ,pd "<pipe-message>pod2text<enter>"

=head1 ATTENDEES

In order of appearance (I think).

=over

=item Bob

=item Chris

=item George

Unfortunately, had to leave early to pick up his son from a calculus
class.  We all hope he's receiving good marks.

=item Jonathan

Joining us again from as far away as Irvine.  Perhaps our most dedicated
Monger.

=item Manny

=item Al

=item Jason

A first-time Monger.  He is a systems engineer by trade.  His Perl code
consists mostly of short get-things-done scripts or one-off hacks - they
work and are quickly forgotten.

=item Cathy

=back

=head1 TOPICS

=head2 Batting for the Other Team

Chris started off the meeting by embarassingly admitting that he had
coded in Python.  In fact, his first foray into Python was to create
Python bindings for a C library on a Solaris 8 system.  It was all for a
good cause, though, as he was proving that it was not Perl that was the
issue with the library.

=head2 Hot or Not?

Manny complained that his office is either too hot or too cold.
Seriously, it's never just right.  The two bears in the neighboring
office can never decide on an appropriate temperature.  The third, often
hailed as being "just right," is on sabbatical.

=head2 Perl101.org: Lessons in Design

Jonathan pointed out that the perl101.org is "horrible."  He was heard
exclaiming, "it's the way programmers build sites!"  He has a valid
point.  It's not useful unless the user is already somewhat familiar
enough with Perl that the site starts to lose usefulness.

It is, however, an open effort.  Patches welcome.

=head2 Plone in My Ass

Manny has all sorts of problems plaguing him at his place of employment.
If it's not data that actively thwarts his attempts to reported on it,
it's the irritating need to parse arbitrary e-mail from procmail(1),
or--worse yet--an intense desire to be rid of Plone.

Speaking of irritating systems, Al wanted everyone to know that to gain
access to .NET "logs" in IIS, the only way to do that is to attach to
the running IIS process with the Visual Studio debugger.

=head2 Tags, Branches and Syncs, Oh My

The soon-to-be classic discussion on the relative merits of CVS versus
Subversion was brought up once again.  Chris's pet peeve when it comes
to Subversion is the complete lack of true tags.  Al agreed, noting that
he used to have a nice Perl (of course) script to publish content based
on CVS repository tags; unfortunately, the same can't be done in
Subversion.

In resopnse to some questions about team coordination, issue tracking,
and offline repository commits, Al brought up Trac
(L<http://trac.edgewall.org/>) and git2p4, which works with Perforce in
a similar way as SVK works with Subversion.

=head2 Will Code for Dew

Bob is still in search of honest (or not-so-honest) employ.  Al has a
new job, too.

Also, important safety tip of the month: Don't ever work for a hosting
company.

Jonathan related some experiences he's had acquiring side-word on web
sites such as oDesk.  It's more difficult than it needs to be.  People
tend to have very unrealistic expectations, from wanting to pay less
than minimum wage for non-trivial projects, to continuously extending
the scope of the original request.

=head2 Flex Time and the Modern Office Drone

A quick poll was conducted.  When does everyone arrive at work?  There
was a fairly wide range of answers, some more sane than others.  What
kind of self-respecting Perl hacker shows up at 06:30?

Don't ask Manny when he arrives.  He often stretches the definition of
"morning."  (Hey, it's morning somewhere, right?)

=head2 How to Run Productive Meetings, for Dummies

There was a general agreement that meetings suck.  In fact, more
meetings should be held on IRC.  It works for a number of Open Source
projects, why not multi-billion dollar companies?

=head2 Perl is Dead; Long Live Perl

Sadly, the Orange County, CA Perl Mongers is a dormant group, which is
why we are graced with Jonathan's presence every month.  The London, UK
group is hot, though.

=head2 Free Bread

Near closing, the manager for Panera Bread circled the store, handing
out free baguettes.  They were quite tasty.

=head2 If it Was Hard to Write, it Should Be Hard to Read

Manny pointed out that he believes Chris is such a faithful follower of
documentation as a way of justifying the obfuscated code he so regularly
writes.

=head2 My Distro Can Beat Up Your Distro

To end the night with a bang, Cathy started the requisite Linux
distribution religious flame war.

=cut
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