Wed. September 10th, 6:53pm at FreeGeek -- 1731 SE 10th Ave.

Speaker: Jonathan Leto Topic: Scientific Computing with Math::GSL

This talk will be an introduction to doing scientific computing with Perl and Math::GSL. This module provides access to functions from the GNU Scientific Library via Perl code.

Why would you want to do that? Using the Perl interpreter's easy and fast I/O, string processing, and managed memory reduces programming time while GSL's optimized numerical library (compiled C) gives you access to a variety of mathematical routines to do the heavy lifting.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ http://search.cpan.org/dist/Math-GSL/

You do not need to know Perl or bring a lab coat. You should bring your scientist friends (steal their lab coat?) and it helps if you know how to program in some language (FORTRAN anyone?), or something about math.

As always, social hour at the Lucky Lab after the meeting.

Wed. November 12th, 6:53pm at FreeGeek -- 1731 SE 10th Ave.

Speaker: Gabrielle Roth Topic: 600 Simple Strategies for Sanely Summarizing Cisco Syslogs

Syslog is a handy troubleshooting tool, but only if you actually read what's logged. I wrote a Cisco syslog parser & reporter as part of our network fault-management system. We'll go over:

• network management basics
• why we needed this specific tool
• why I created my own tool from scratch (instead of using an off-the-shelf solution)
• how I did it & what the results were, and
• what I'm going to do next.

You don't need to be a Cisco engineer or even know much Perl to get something out of this talk.

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

This will be a guided "hack session" about getting involved with the development of Rakudo, the first fully-featured Perl 6 implementation, which runs on the Parrot Virtual Machine. There will be a briefing at the beginning of the meeting to bring everyone up to speed and clarify any confusing terminology.

Then we will break into groups and learn-by-hacking on whatever interests the participants. You must be interested in doing something with Perl 6/Rakudo, start now!

The end of the meeting will be a short wrap-up where people voice there experiences working on Rakudo (what needs to be made easier? what rocks? what sucks? what do you want to work on next time?).

PDX.pm normally meets at 7-till-7 (6:53pm) at FreeGeek for roughly an hour or so, then walks a few blocks to the Lucky Labrador Brew Pub for social hour.

I started using Perl just over six years ago, when 5.6.2 was already getting old and 5.8.1 was on the way. By the time I put my first module on the CPAN, over half of the current contributors had already shipped.

I have often read the source of a core module and asked "Why?" only to discover some unknown feature or historical accident. The history lesson continues all the way into the roots of Unix in some cases, but also often leaves me thinking "So?". And now I am quickly approaching my 40th CPAN distribution.

In this talk, I will share my own experiences in developing with Perl and explore the idea of the "Modern" or "Enlightened" Perl. Did I miss the heyday of Perl or are we still making that now? How does today's Perl code look different than it did 5 or 10 years ago? Is there a Perl renaissance coming, and what does it have to do with Perl 6? What modules should you be using for new development? Where is my flying car? Why am I still programming in Perl? And why am I programming at all?

I will try to find answers to some of these questions and invite you to bring questions (or answers!) of your own.

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the LuckyLab.

Test::Builder underpins 80% of the tests on CPAN. Its limitations become everyone's limitations. It's done a very good job adapting the last seven years, and testing has become more sophisticated in that time, but age and backwards compatibility holds things back. There are a number of desired features which Test::Builder cannot support, such as end-of-test actions, without radically altering how tests are built.

thus: Test::Builder2.

This will be "something of a talk" followed by some hacking both on Test::Builder2 directly and writing new test modules. It'll give folks an opportunity to work both with Moose (well, Mouse) and git. Pair programming will make life easier, we can pair of experienced folks with inexperienced. Or just huddle together for strength in numbers. I find it easier to pair when each person has their own keyboard, so I'm going to bring along a few spare keyboards and mice. I encourage others to do the same.

Moose is a postmodern object system for Perl 5.

Moose's recent rise in popularity has led to a surge of declarative class-building and accessor-generating modules, but the real power of Moose comes from its metaclass fundamentals, not from the syntactic sugar of has(). Using Moose as a foundation makes it easier for your code to grow and scale.

I'll cover some of the concepts in Moose that the MOP (Meta-Object Protocol) makes possible, especially roles and type constraints. If we have time, I'll go through a simple Moose extension, focusing on the mechanisms Moose provides to help your code play nicely with others'.

If the first sentence of this description was news to you, you should at least read the SYNOPSIS of Moose, and if you can get through Moose::Manual and Moose::Manual::Concepts, so much the better. I'll expect a lot of questions, but I hope to move past "what is an object" pretty quickly. By the end of the night I hope you'll have a better understanding of the depth of what Moose provides, and why has() is only the tip of the iceberg. I don't expect that everyone will immediately understand every concept provided – my goal is to impress you so much with Moose's awesomeness that you're willing to follow up later on the documentation pointers that I throw out.

PDX.pm meetings are on the second Wednesday of each month at 6:53pm, typically at Free Geek. Meetings are free-of-charge for all PortlandPerlMongerMembers. The cost for non-members is $2,000,000,000.00 per person.

What tools and techniques do you use to keep your project shiny and well-oiled? Bring a sample for show-and-tell, or just a few things to say about it.

Please see the kwiki link for the latest details about this meeting. Our panels always lead to interesting and surprising discussion.

Codesprint for learning about Perl 5 development, git and getting 5.10.1 out the door. This is our first codesprint, so things are still a bit up in the air.

Useful stuff:

5.10.1 blockers: http://tr.im/perl5_10_1_blockers

Using the Perl git repo: http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/pod/perlrepository.pod (short and sweet)

How to hack the Perl internals: http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob/HEAD:/pod/perlhack.pod (kinda scary)

Panel: Selena Deckelmann, Igal Koshevoy, Jeff Lavallee, David Wheeler

This will be a panel discussion about the ups, downs, ins, and outs of relational, row, key-value, and hierarchical data stores (simplistic buzzwordiness: SQL vs NOSQL aka ACID CRUD.)

The panel will discuss parallelism, scale, data integrity, normalization, business logic, ORMs, and performance. Some of the following might be addressed:

• why do you want a relational DB?
• why do you not want a relational DB?
• Membase, MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra
• Tokyo Tyrant, CouchDB, old school K/V (zodb, bdb)
• distinctions between "relational" and "row store"
• how filesystem settings affect the database
• how important is your data?
• common errors in SQL schemas or usage
• is count(*) supposed to be fast?
• efficiency vs speed vs parallel cleverness
• sharding
• what is "scale" and do you need it?
• massively denormalized, or massively normalized?
• ORMs, materialized views, indexes, and the query planner
• typical performance with small/large, simple/complex data sets

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

We will be having three lightning-ish talks at PDX.pm this month.

Perl and Parrot in Google Code-In : Highlights and How To Get Involved

-- Jonathan "Duke" Leto

Tool::Bench : A Generalized Benchmarking Framework for Just About Anything

-- Ben Hengst

Graphics in Software Documentation : Why The Void?

-- Otto Hirr

Please come by and be sure to come hang out afterwards at the Lucky Lab social hour, just a few blocks away.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Web development with Plack and Kelp Stefan G. will talk and present slides on how to create a web application with the Kelp web framework.

How Plack runs a web application What Kelp adds on top of Plack Why Kelp and not Dancer, Mojolicious or Catalyst How to create a basic web app How to capture HTTP requests and return HTTP responses How to return HTML and JSON

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.

NOTE: Change of Venue!

We're going to change things up this month and will be hosting our first meeting of the year downtown. Join us at the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) office, located at 12th and NW Davis.

Dana Jacobsen will give a talk on his number theory module. This is an early version of the talk for FOSDEM.

This talk describes the history, design, and implementation details of a number theory module for Perl. With implementations for most functions in C, C+GMP, and Perl this offers speed on most platforms as well as portability. Comparisons will be made with tools such as Pari/GP, SymPy, SAGE, Primo, OpenPFGW, and others.

Full synopsis here

We'll migrate to Life of Riley or another nearby venue after the meeting for drinks and food.

Join us at the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) office, located at 12th and NW Davis.

Stefan and Anthony will be discussing some new alternatives to POD that they've both been working on. Stefan has been working on parsing Markdown formatted documentation out of Perl source. Anthony has been working on an extension to the Sphinx documentation engine to support writing rST formatted documentation in Perl source. Both attempts are in their infancy, so be sure to give feedback and suggestions.

If anyone else would like to join in, or if someone wants to defend lowly ol’ POD, you’re welcome to join in as well.

Full synopsis

Join us back at Freegeek this month for a talk by Andrew on Perl in OpenBSD.

Andrew Fresh will be previewing his hopeful YAPC::NA talk on Perl in the OpenBSD base system.

Perl 5.003 was imported as part of the OpenBSD base system in 1996 by Jason Downs (downsj@) and has been used heavily ever since. Quite a few system utilites are written in perl, one of the largest being Marc Espie's (espie@) rewrite of the package management tools and his amazing dpb (distributed package build) tool. Andrew is the current maintainer for perl in OpenBSD and wants to share what's going on.

Full synopsis

Join us afterwards at the SE Lucky Lab for drinks and more conversation.

Join us back at Freegeek this month for a talk by VM Brasseur on project failure.

Projects fail in droves. Up to 90% of new businesses fail within 10 years. Screws fall out all the time; the world is an imperfect place.

Just because it happens doesn’t mean we can’t do our best to prevent it or—at the very least—to minimize the damage when it does. As a matter of fact, embracing failure can be one of the best things you do for your project. Failure is a vital part of evolution. By learning to love failure we learn how to take the next step forward. Ignoring or punishing failure leads to stagnation and wasted potential.

Full synopsis

Join us afterwards at the SE Lucky Lab for drinks and more conversation.

This month, we have some last minute interest in lightning talks. We have two talks slated currently, feel free to bring your own topic as well.

Join us afterwards at the SE Lucky Lab for drinks and more conversation.

This month, Andrew Fresh will be talking about how inheritance works in perl.

You will learn how perl figures out what to do when you call $object->method and gain a better understanding of how classes work.

Although this is a perl specific talk, the concepts are somewhat similar in other languages such as Python.

Join us afterwards at the SE Lucky Lab for drinks and more conversation.

A long time ago in a community far away ...

This month, Matt S Trout is in town and will be speaking on the history and future of DBIx::Class.

As always, join us afterwards at the SE Lucky Lab for drinks and more conversation.

Chad will be reviewing his work on Test::Stream this month.

As always, join us afterwards at the SE Lucky Lab for drinks and more conversation.

We'll be meeting this month to take another look at the Perl 6 release scheduled for Christmas.

• Andrew will be showing some examples of Perl 6 using examples from Advent of Code
• Anthony will be reporting on writing a Perl 6 web application and the general state of affairs

As always, join us at the Lucky Lab Brewpub afterwards

Ingy will be joining us to give 12 lightning talks, insulated chairs will be provided.

NOTE: We are meeting again at the Dreamhost office in Pioneer Square.

We will follow the meeting with drinks and Rialto's Pool Hall.

Andrew will be giving a preview of his YAPC talk, "Writing your own tools for development"

More info on his talk here: http://www.yapcna.org/yn2016/talk/6602

NOTE: We are meeting again at the Dreamhost office in Pioneer Square.

We will follow the meeting with drinks and Rialto's Pool Hall.

NOTE: We'll be back at Free Geek for this meeting!

Dana Jacobsen will be giving his YAPC::NA talk on userspace entorpy, titled "Userspace entropy: You too can dabble in voodoo!"

More info on his talk here: http://www.yapcna.org/yn2016/talk/6606

We'll follow up the meeting with food and drinks at Lucky Lab

Lyle Kopnicky will present a work in progress:

Funk, a library for functional programming. This currently includes a datatype for linked lists, option types, and generic functions for displaying and equality testing that work on both the new types and Perl data structures. Type constraints can also be imposed on the lists. He is soliciting feedback as to the architecture and functionality of the library.

We may find a pub or suitable source of refreshments after.

Sergey Kolychev will give an overview of AI::MXNet, a Perl interface to the MXNet machine learning library. https://metacpan.org/release/AI-MXNet

We may find a pub or suitable source of refreshments after.

Bring your laptop and curiosity about Perl 6 to join us for a night of hacking, hello world, and whatnot. Meeting in North Portland for variety.

Bring your laptop and/or curiosity about Perl. We're going to update the website with fresh truths / future lies. Meeting in North Portland, not the SE Lucky Lab.

Bring your laptop and/or curiosity about Perl, problems caused or solved by Perl.

Bring your laptop and curiosity about Perl 6 to join us for a night of hacking, hello world, and whatnot.

TestML - Data Driven Testing for All Modern Programming Languages

by Ingy dot Net

In 2004 I created the Test::Base data driven testing module for CPAN. It became popular with several prolific CPAN authors like MIYAGAWA and became the main testing framework for companies like Socialtext and OpenResty, In 2010 I decided to "Acmeize" it and I made TestML with the intent of making it work in all programming languages. I got it going in Perl5/CPAN and a couple other languages. In 2017 OpenResty paid me to write a new version of the language in their proprietary ecosystem, and the resulting idea was really much better. They allowed me to take the new ideas to Open Source and in 2018 I have the new great TestML language. It is currently working in 8 languages (Bash, CoffeeScript, Go, JavaScript, Perl 5, Perl 6, Python 2 and Python 3) and easy to port. Other ports are under way including C++. The official YAML test suite is written in TestML!

In this talk I will:

• Introduce you to the TestML language (it's so simple, most programs are a single line!)
• Show how TestML works well with any language's existing test frameworks
• Show how to use in Perl 5 and 6 and others
• Show how the language is compiled to Lingy (a JSON based Lisp)
• Show how to port TestML to a new programming language or test framework
• and much more!

Bring your coding projects or puzzles to share.

Bring your coding projects or puzzles to share.

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.

Bring your coding projects or puzzles to share.

Join grassroots bicycle advocates and open data / open government / open code folks to work on collaborative mapping and resolution of transportation safety issues. Everyone is welcome whether you have years of programming / tech experience or just a few pictures of dirty bike lanes and broken sidewalks. We'll look at pdxreporter, 823-safe data, and other public data (orcycle, nearlykilled.me, etc.) Look for some "activists" with computers or just shout "did anyone here report a pothole?" Joint meeting with Portland Perl Mongers.

Bring your coding projects or puzzles to share.

Bring your coding projects or puzzles to share.