Birmingham Perl Mongers are delighted to be able to announce that they have once again sponsored the hosting and SSL certification required for the CPAN Testers for a further year. Comprising a growing set of databases and dynamic sites to present the reports data in a variety of different ways, the CPAN Testers server has become a vaulable asset to the CPAN authors and users alike.

The funding for the next year covers the costs of hosting the server for a second year, following our support of the project for 2008/9. For further information, please read the article posted on the CPAN Testers blog.

Organising the technical meetings this year has proved rather troublesome. Although we can often get some interesting talks together, advertising them in time and getting a regular attendance hasn't been a strong point.

As such next year I have proposed a slightly different format. We will still hold a technical meeting Feb-Nov, but we will alternate between a Technical Presentation night (with slides and speakers) and a Technical Discussion night.

The Technical Discussion nights will be an opportunity for people to bring along code, and have a group of us help out with any problems. It will also be a good opportunity to look at helping out with the Phalanx project, where we can take a distribution on CPAN and write some tests for it. Thus helping people to understand how to write tests and improve their Perl skills, as well as helping to provide the Perl community with more robust CPAN distributions :)

In addition it may well be a good opportunity to hack on some community projects, such as the Perl.org Patches project [1], Padre [2], CPAN Testers [3] or any other project that might value some of our time.

[1] http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/perl-org-patches
[2] http://padre.perlide.org/
[3] http://www.cpantesters.org/

The Technical Discussion nights will likely be fairly free format. So even though we may suggest a topic/project to work on, anyone can still just turn up and bring along something for us to look at.

The benefit of this is that if for any reason we are unable to arrange a Technical Presentation night (due to lack of speakers, double bookings and the like), we can run a Technical Discussion night instead, rather than having to cancel the meeting.

Provisionally we'll start with a Technical Presentation night in Feb 2010, then a Technical Discussion night in Mar 2010, and alternate from then on. Any changes will be advertised on the website and the mailing list.

For various reasons no technical speakers had been arranged for Wednesday 25th November, which was due to be our technical meeting date. As it is also JJ's birthday, we decided to make it an emergency social.

Details for where we will be meeting and eating will be announced shortly, once JJ has had a chance to find out from Penny where the rather unusual venue was!

This Wednesday (9th September 2009) at our regular Social Meeting at The Dragon Inn on Hurst Street, Birmingham Perl Mongers will be celebrating our 9th Birthday. Mike Bissett and myself started with humble beginnings, and we've grown into a lively and inspiring group .. at least for me. We've come a long way from our hopes to meet other Perl programmers in Brum.

For those who have not made it along to a social before, please come long on Wednesday and help us raise a glass or two. Everyone is more than welcome, including partners, as we really are a friendly bunch ... promise :)

Happy Birthday us :)

PS: For the trivia geeks, we'll be 09 on 09/09/09!

Update: Photos now online.

After several months of planning, the 2009 QA Hackathon finally happened with 24 attendees working on a variety of QA activities over the 3 days from 28th March to 30th March. All the attendees seemed to have a great time, and got a lot of work done, not least of which was the release of Nested TAP and the further design and work on Metabase for use within the CPAN Testers infrastructure.

Some reviews of the weekend have already started to surface, and you can read them by clicking the links below:

• Initial Summary by Adam Kennedy
• Test::Builder2 write-up by Colin Newell
• What happens at a Hackathon? by Piers Cawley

Many thanks to all the attendees who came along and got involved, and a big big thank you to all the sponsors, without who we wouldn't have been able to host the event.

Since YAPC::Europe in 2006, when Birmingham hosted the annual european Perl conference, YAPC::Europe has run a survey among the attendees. The data and feedback have been very useful for organisers to see where their audience's interested are, and where they perhaps should be. The results of the 2006 and 2007 surveys have been previously published, but there was no single central source to record all that information.

As such, the website YAPC Conference Surveys was launched this week, to act as a focal point for the past and future surveys. For 2009, alongside YAPC::Europe, the YAPC::NA will also be running a survey after the event. In addition both conferences will be featuring the ability to feedback on talks, tutorials and master classes, so that speakers can get a better understanding of how their presentations went.

See the YAPC Conference Surveys website for more details.

Foillowing up on the last news item, I should also mention that we also have a Facebook group. Feel  free to join and catch up with any special events we announce. Our current special event is the Christmas Social, so please add yourself if you didn't get an invite and plan to come along.

For those familiar with the professional networking site, LinkedIn, you may be interested to learn that Birmingham Perl Mongers now has it's very own group. Feel free to join the group and tell others about us. There are several Perl related groups already on LinkedIn, as well as several Perl Monger user groups that have added themselves. The networking side does work, and it can be a more professional way to associate yourselves with coworkers (past and present).

Following an motion passed at the AGM in January, as of October 2008 our membership fees have changed. For those wishing to join Birmingham Perl Mongers as full paid up member, the fees are now £25 for waged and £10 for unwaged. The membership fees help to run the company behind Birmingham Perl Mongers, for such items as administration fees to register with Companies House and also to help costs of hosting the website and related projects. To become a member please see out Terms & Conditions of Membership.

Okay, they weren't exactly found, and they're not astrological planets either, but they're still new(ish).

First off, Planet Perl, which has actually been around for quite some time. A collection of Perl related blogs, including a few from use.perl, which you can read via the web page, or from an RSS feed. If you have a Perl blog, feel free to email Robert and Ask to be added to Planet Perl.

Following on from Planet Perl, Hex has created an alternative site that aims to be a companion site called Perlsphere. Likewise you can read the blogs via the web page, or through the RSS feed. Hex is also keen to get more people adding their Perl blogs to the feed, so feel free to email him to added to Perlsphere.

Thirdly, we now have a Planet feed specifically for our YAPC conferences from around the world, at Planet YAPC. Run by The Perl Foundation , the planet uses Plagger to search for blog entries from the likes of bloglines, technorati, etc, looking for any mention of the word YAPC. As such if you're planning to attend a YAPC somewhere in the world, get your blog listed on a blog rating site, and you'll find your post hopefully appearing. Once again you can read the web page, or plug the RSS feed into your favourite aggregator.

So if you've been think how you can add to your thirst for Perl knowledge, now you have 3 new sites to read. Enjoy.