Open Sourcing DBIx::Class::Events

Andrew Hewus Fresh will be giving a trial run of his TPCiP talk

While I will explain a bit about what DBIx::Class::Events does and how it works, this talk is primarily about open source contributions being driven by the folks in a company who care about them and how it is up to those people to provide the resources and knowledge to everyone else in order to create an open source culture in the workplace. As far as I know, no request to open source something has ever been denied by my employer, Grant Street Group, and while the company has always had the same "go for it" attitude, the folks writing code are only just starting to gain momentum releasing things publicly. I'll talk about showing other folks in the company the benefits of sharing code internally, how that exposed the benefits of open-source in general, and how we as a company progressed to getting DBIx::Class::Events onto the CPAN.

Join us at Freegeek for this month's installment of PDX.pm.

As always, join us for beers at the Lucky Lab after the meetup.

Highly Functional Programming

Speaker: Eric Wilhelm

Functional programming is very pure and elegant when nothing can change, and the computer can reason about your code for you -- in theory. Reality is messier, but Perl and other high-level languages support pure functions as a subset of the procedural and OO paradigms, so why don't we use them more? Functional techniques are good problem solving tools, useful for event-driven programs, and can be mixed into traditional OO and procedural codebases for better code reuse and testability.

In this talk, we'll look at some benefits of purely functional programming from a pragmatic and procedural viewpoint. There will be absolutely no mention of monads because we will just ride our lambdas through the mud and get it done. We'll see how good programming practices tend to suggest stateless and functional approaches. We'll examine techniques for refactoring which separate functions from state changes and allow you to better test and reason about your code. Finally, we'll look at language interpreters and discuss how technology might be able to help get even more benefits out of highly functional programming approaches.

This is a preview of an upcoming OSCON talk.

As always, meet us at the Lucky Lab for some beer and good company following the meeting.

Deploying Perl Applications with Carton

Speaker: Ian Burrell

CPAN has lots of useful Perl modules and it makes it easy to install them. But it has the problem of how you specify the modules your application needs to install, how you replicate the install on different machines, and how you keep applications and system packages separate.

Carton is built on top of Cpanminus and local::lib. Cpanminus is a simple command-line tool for installing CPAN modules. local::lib helps install modules into an application directory. It uses a new file format, Cpanfile, to define the module deepencies, including version specification. It records the installed versions so the specific sets of modules can be recreated on other machines and is checked into version control.

We use Carton to install modules for our large Perl applications. It allows developers to install modules without installing system administrators. Since installing modules can be slow, we implemented caching on top of Carton. We deploy applications with Capistrano and have integrated Carton into our build and deployment process.

As always, meet us at the Lucky Lab for some beer and good company following the meeting.

Hack night at PDX.pm! Bring a project or a module to work on. The floor is open if you have anything to demo. If you don't find us at Freegeek, stop on by Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

Rafael will be doing a demo and some live coding using Light Table -- an IDE that, among other features, offers live evaluation of code -- along with a plugin for Light Table that enables live evaluation of Perl code.

We'll follow up and close out with some open floor discussion time.

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

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Module Interface/API design

Speaker: Chad 'Exodist' Granum

Most developers create a module when they want to solve a problem. Most focus goes into the inner-workings of the module. Interface often takes a backseat and is addressed as an afterthought. This approach to interface design leads to horrible headaches.

For Part 1 Chad will be introducing several module interface paradigms. This includes a brief review of OO, as well as simple exporters and declarative builders. Examples from common CPAN modules will be given.

For Part 2 chad will take attendees through an exercise in designing an API for an example module that is actually useful (and not simply a toy for the example). We will weigh the pros and cons of different interface possibilities as well as show a complete implementation.

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

More information

Bring your projects to an informal project hack night tonight at Freegeek! We might move the projects to somewhere with beer, and head to the Lucky Lab Brew Pub early.

ØMQ Sockets in Perl

Speaker: Anthony Johnson

Part message queue, part socket implementation sugar, ØMQ can be used to simplify socket communication and to scale out applications, and you don't even have to worry about the awful parts of socket communication. But more aptly and straight from the horse's mouth:

ØMQ (also seen as ZeroMQ, 0MQ, zmq) looks like an embeddable networking library but acts like a concurrency framework. It gives you sockets that carry atomic messages across various transports like in-process, inter-process, TCP, and multicast. You can connect sockets N-to-N with patterns like fanout, pub-sub, task distribution, and request-reply. It's fast enough to be the fabric for clustered products. Its asynchronous I/O model gives you scalable multicore applications, built as asynchronous message-processing tasks. It has a score of language APIs and runs on most operating systems. ØMQ is from iMatix and is LGPLv3 open source.

Find out what ØMQ is, where to use it, and learn about common patterns, pitfalls, and how it can be used for building anti-RESTful APIs. Anthony will elaborate on what it took to build a scaled out application and API using Python, Perl, and ØMQ.

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

More information

Show and Tell night! Bring your projects, problems, and presentations for show and tell/lightning talks. As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

Topics include:

• Anthony - Memory profiling and Test::LeakTrace
• You - Something

More information

fennec is an alternate testing framework for perl. It's author will discuss recent improvements that have been made as the project has developed.

note: date one week earlier than usual meeting and now at PSU rather than Free Geek!

The Portland Perl Mongers and Portland Linux/Unix Group are pleased to welcome world-renowned Perl trainer and developer Paul Fenwick

The Perl Renaissance is in full swing. Object frameworks and syntax have been undated, web frameworks are easy and powerful, and modules are easy to manage and install. We will cover:

• Overhauling Perl’s Object Oriented framework with Moose.
• Using MooseX::Method::Signatures for beautiful classes.
• Building web applications using Dancer
• Not worrying about web servers by using Plack.
• Critiquing your code with Perl::Critic
• Write amazing regexps with named captures.
• Install new modules quickly and easily with cpanminus
• Manage Perl installations easily with perlbrew
• A whole swag of new features with perl 5.10–5.16
• Much, much more!

About Paul

Adventuretarian. Enjoys Perl, social hacking, mycology, scuba diving, coffee, cycling, FOSS, meeting new people, and talking like a pirate. World famous in NZ.

This meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub NW at 1945 NW Quimby

"what is this perl5i thing?" MichaelSchwern talks about perl5i with possible hackathon to follow.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

speaker: MichaelSchwern

If a developer ever says “it’s really simple”, run and do not look back.

Developers often throw around terms like “easy” and “obvious” but what do they tell them about what to do to make something “easier” and “more obvious”? What does it tell them about whether somebody else will find something “easy” and “obvious”? Not a lot.

Giving simple questions simple answers tells how to take action to make things easier and more obvious to the casual user. Embracing the task of providng simple answers rejects the fallacy that complex implementations mean complex answers. It creates a new relationship of respect between the user and the developer; a good user can ask a simple question illuminating what people want to do, and a good developer fulfills the user’s desire for a simple answer. What does it mean to be simple?

• How do you find it?
• What are its benefits?
• What happens when you don’t seek simplicity?

pdx.pm governance

Before the presentation, we'll have a short discussion about the future of the monthly group meetings as Eric Wilhelm is no longer able to be the sole organizer.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

speaker: Eric Wilhelm and Anthony Johnson

We will have an overview and demonstration of async and event-driven web applications and websockets with Perl.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

speaker: round table

A "Perl with Objects" round table. We'll examine usage and issues with class composition, performance, and compatibility with various lighter-weight alternatives.

• Mouse vs Moose vs Moo, when to use which? – Schwern
• Moose, Mouse, and Moo performance – Dana Jacobsen
• Zeus and Contradictory.pm – Eric Wilhelm
• Reindeer – Chris Weyl
• MOP in the core – O_o

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

speaker: David Wheeler

SQL change management is hard. Most “migration”-style implementations require opaque naming conventions, prefer DSLs that cover a fraction of SQL, and require duplication of code for simple changes to existing functions. Such does not have to be. And now it’s not

Introducing Sqitch, simple SQL change management that doesn’t suck. Sqitch doesn’t care what programming language your app is written in. It has no opinions as to what database to use or what its schema should look like. And it doesn’t require sequentially-named migration scripts or the use of any DSL other than SQL. Sqitch lets you to write SQL migration scripts that target your database, and provides a simple, unintrusive interface for specifying dependencies, so that it can run things in the proper order.

So come to this talk to learn all about Sqitch: How it works, where to get it, and how to get the most out of managing database deployments.

David Wheeler is Senior Data Architect at iovation and an associate at PGExperts. He is responsible, among other things, for PGXN, pgTAP, DesignScene, and way too many CPAN modules. He lives in Portland unless he’s traveling with his family.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

speaker: Dana Jacobsen

Dana will give a brief introduction to primes, primality testing, and sieves, then show examples in Perl. Dana is the author of the Math::Prime::Util module on CPAN. Outline:

• Primes
• Applications
• Primality testing in Perl
• Sieves
• 15 sieve implementations in Perl including a new string-based sieve
• 6 CPAN modules
• Performance and memory use
• Prime Counting

Sadly a lot of the web examples of Perl sieves are quite bad, often 3-6x slower than Perl can do. We can do better! There are also a number of CPAN modules related to primes, which will briefly be covered.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

speaker: Jonathan "Duke" Leto

So, there's this dude named Travis who lives in a cloud and has nothing better to do on a Thursday night than download your latest commit, run your tests, and ridicule you on the twitternets when you broke the build... or something like that. But even if you don't need your pocket to jiggle on the way to fried pies, you should have some sort of automated continuous integration setup testing your code to keep you and your commits working smoothly. Jonathan will talk about Travis CI, demonstrate setting-up Travis for a public github project, and cover some of Jitterbug.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

speakers: Eric Wilhelm + Jonathan "Duke" Leto

(Rumored cameo / lightning talk by Florian "rafl" Ragwitz.)

Programming in the Future - a preview of the upcoming OSCON presentation covering the last and next 25 years of programming technology using Perl as our time machine. We'll look at the evolution of tools, syntax, modules, and standard practices, the gooey innards, and some "hot new things" which are still being discovered again.

Introduction to Dist::Zilla for Newbies - eliminates your excuses for not learning more about Dist::Zilla and using it on a regular basis. By the end of this talk, you will know how and why to use dzil as your favorite Perl package developer tool, and you might even need to publish more code on the CPAN just to have an excuse to use it more.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab Brew Pub.

In celebration of having already executed one successful emergency rescheduled meeting replacement beer-drinking social hour this month, we'll be starting 22 minutes later and roughly 0.7 furlongs norther than the usual time and space.

I will put out a pdx.pm sign. We might be out back depending on how crowded and noisy it is. You can also probably find us with or near the weekly hackathon folks.

Tonight will be a round-table session discussing your favorite Perl features (whether new or old) and sharing fun tidbits you've found on your programming and debugging adventures. Whether you're exploring perl5i and other wild new meta layers, learning new tricks with Moose, or discovering the bottom half of the open() pod, come and share your knowledge (and questions) with the group.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

This informal panel / round-table discussion will review and demonstrate what has changed over the last few years since Plack has become the leading deployment/glue technology for Perl web applications.

While Plack/PSGI is a vastly more flexible, maintainable, deployable, and scalable model than CGI, in many ways it is a back-to-basics simplification of the ways in which code and servers interact. It has also led to new web frameworks which allow you to forget about all of those fundamental details. We'll try to look at the overall picture, plus specific examples and discuss use cases and migration experiences.

Panel members:

• Ben: Dancer demo
• Joshua: a second person to answer Dancer questions
• Clay: CGI to Plack conversion
• Eric: server options for testing and deployment

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

speaker: Richard Fobes

The new CPAN module named Voting::VoteFairRanking yields higher levels of voting fairness. You do voting when you click on Google results, and you use voting results when you view the star rating of an Amazon product.

Now learn how voting really works, how it is usually miscalculated – intentionally in the case of elections – and how it can be done to fully extract the wisdom in a group. Learn the math behind the puppet strings that connect politicians (of both parties) to the biggest campaign contributors. (Partial spoiler: The biggest unfairness is hidden in primary elections.) Also learn the math that eventually will cut those puppet strings. Along the way you will learn that there are different kinds of popularity.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

speaker: Chad 'Exodist' Granum

Refactoring is something many developers approach with a great deal of fear. Sometimes you may need to refactor code that you do not understand. Sometimes there are no unit tests. Sometimes things can be scary.

Chad will be showing techniques for cleaning/refactoring code that will help avoid errors, and make things less scary. Ideally people will bring small/medium code samples or modules as examples. If nobody brings anything we may pull something off of cpan.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

7th-ish Annual-ish Michael G Schwern pdx.pm Presentation

Presentation details to be determined. (Rumored to be about small, furry creatures with antlers aka OOSE.)

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

speaker: Ingy döt Net - http://ingy.net/

Acmeism (http://acmeism.org) is the ability to think about and express one's creative ideas, beyond language borders. In programming, this means creating things that benefit multiple languages and communities. Perl is effectively one great community with 2 great languages (Perl 5 and Perl 6). Acmeism is essential to mongers, but kindly extends to pythonistas, brigadiers and nodelings as well.

Pegex is an Acmeist parsing language. Think of it as Perl 6 Rules and Regexp::Grammars for all programmers. Write One Grammar, Parse Everywhere. This makes Pegex the quintessential tool in the Acmeist's belt. Pegex.pm is fully functional in Perl 5, and working it's way across the Acmeist landscape. Come see Ingy döt Net (an inventor of YAML and the father of Acmeism) talk about Pegex and the exciting future of Acmeism.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

speaker: Chad 'Exodist' Granum

The DCI concept was created by Trygve Reenskaug, (inventor of MVC) and James Coplien.

DCI Stands for Data, Context, Interactions. It was created to solve the problem of unpredictable emergent behavior in networks of interacting objects. This problem shows itself in complex OOP projects, most commonly in projects with deep polymorphism. This is a problem that Procedural/Imperative Programming does not have.

DCI does not replace OOP, instead it augments it with lessons learned from looking back at Procedural Programming. It defines a way to encapsulate use cases into a single place. This provides an advantage to the programmer by reducing the number of interactions that need to be tracked. Another advantage is the reduction of side-effects between contexts.

Another way to look at it is that a DCI implementation is much more maintainable as a project matures. Changes to requirements and additional features cause clean OOP project to degrade into spaghetti. DCI on the other hand maintains code clarity under changing requirements.

You will Learn:

• How to think in DCI
• How the DCI cpan package helps you write DCI
• That you may already write things in a form of DCI
• How a DCI implementation compares to an OOP implementation (in a generic task)

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

speaker: Eric Wilhelm

Shebangml is a markup language which saves programmers from gouging their eyes out on pointy angle brackets.

Most pointy ML data (SGML/XML/XHTML/HTML) can be translated to and from this human-readable, bacony syntax. This allows modern programmers to interface with legacy software such as WWW browsers and other relics like "Enterprise Java Software". But the true power of shebangml lies in the '#!' (hash-bang/shebang) and its programmable templating features. Unlike most "don't make me write HTML" generators and markup replacements, hbml preserves the good parts of the quoting constructs and attributes+content nature of XML. This makes it not only a fine replacement for obsolete markup languages, but also an ideal foundation for new dialects and applications. The pluggable syntax and interpreter allow you to define static or dynamically loadable constructs, which allows your application to balance convenience features with security issues using clear separations.

This presentation will cover the Shebangml syntax, the basics of the parser/interpreter module, the extensions API, and two real-world applications (the FreeTUIT declarative GUI toolkit and the presentation generator Text::Slidez.)

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.