September sees us celebrating our 12th birthday, and as such we going to properly organise a meal out. Several people have suggested we attend Las Iguanas, a mexican restaurant in the Arcadian, just around the corner from our regular haunt of The Dragon Inn.

The plan is to meet at the restaurant for about 7pm, and for early arrivals to meet in The Dragon Inn from about 6pm. we'll be booking a table for Wednesday 12th September, but we need to know how many people are likely to be coming. If you'd like to come along, please let Barbie know (on or off the mailing list) so we book a big enough table. Partners and friends alike are welcome too, so feel free to invite them along.

See our meeting page for further details.

Recently Mark Keating of the Enlightened Perl Organisation created a Google Calendar to specifically encourage local Perl groups to advertise their events and meetings. As we haven't been advertising ourselves with Google Calendars over the last year, I've dusted off the script I used and updated it.

To see the new calendar, and the existing West Midlands tech Events calendar, visit our Events page and click on the links to see the calendars. Or you can click here and see the new calendar. We still have an ICS file download available to keep up to date with just the Birmingham.pm events and meetings.

This month we have several talks on offer, including one from a guest speaker. We'll be featuring a selection of topics covering RabbitMQ, Jenkins and Command Line Application building. Hopefully something there to interest everyone.

As always, all are welcome, and we'll be meeting in the Sack Of Potatoes from about 6pm, then mving onto the Birmingham Aston Science Park for a 7.30pm start with the talks.

Hope to see you there.

This month, in fact this Wednesday, we have another set of talks for the technical meeting. Both Colin and JJ have offered to present some short talks for us, and I hope we'll have time to review a video from a YAPC or Perl Workshop talk too. If you in or around Birmingham, feel free to come along and join us. All our meetings are free, and all are welcome.

From now we'll be retuyrning to a bi-monthly technical meeting schedule, with meetings being either talk/video presentations or a hackathon. We'll let you know in advance which is which. If you would like to present a talk next year, please get in touch and we'll see what we can schedule.

This year Birmingham Perl Mongers are celebrating their eleventh year. If you're in or near Birmingham tonight, we will be at The Dragon Inn on Hurst Street (near the Arcardian, Glee Club and Hippodrome Theatre) from about 6pm. Please come along and help us raise a glass to everyone who has been a part of our little corner of Perl.

On the 8th September 2010, Birmingham Perl Mongers celebrated their 10th birthday. While there are several other groups around the world who have been in existence longer, I think we are the second longest (uninterrupted) running group in the UK.

Mike Bissett (who was our special guest last month, when he paid us a visit while on holiday, as he now lives in Australia) and I started Birmingham Perl Mongers on our return from OSCON in 2000. We sent off the necessary forms and got ourselves setup on the perl.org servers during August, launched a website, and had our first official meeting in the Hogshead on Newhall Street, on Wednesday 13th September 2000.

Since those early days our numbers have grown, we've been involved with several different projects, hosted a YAPC and a QA Hackathon, held many technical meetings with numerous special guests and generally had a great time.

For our Birthday, JJ and his wife Penny, baked us a cake, decorated appropriately. Photos from last night are now online.

Here's to the next 10 years.

Have you got something interesting to say, a new project to promote, or have just learnt a new way of doing things with some cool modules? Birmingham Perl Mongers are looking for willing speakers to come along and present some interesting talks to us.

While our main focus is most definitely Perl, we do feature other languages and technologies from time to time, so please don't be afraid to offer a talk, just because it doesn't feature Perl. However, if it does feature perl so much the better :)

Our technical meetings are slightly different this year, as we're now featuring technical presentations every 2 months (i.e. March, May, July, September, November), with the intervening months covering a hands-on technical workshop where we can hack each others code, teach 1-to-1, or help improve a particular CPAN module.

So if you have a talk you could present, please get in touch and we'll add you to the itinery.

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.

Would you like to present a talk about Perl, Linux, Open Source or any subject that you think might be of interest to our group? If yes, send an email to the address listed below, together with a title, outline and the time lenght of your talk. Subjects can be about your pet project, your favourite module, some cool programming technique or application you've learned or just about anything. Introductory talks are always welcome, but even expert level talks will still go down well, and if they feature Perl, so much the better. Talks are usually between 5 and 60 minutes, although if it's a really special talk then we'll set aside the whole night for you :)

Following a fantastic year of talks and guest speakers, we're hoping we can continue on with this throughout 2007. If you have a specific date in mind, please let us know. For special guest speakers we may arrange to hold technical events on a different to suite the travelling speaker. We have several speakers already planned for future meetings, but we are always eager to fill more slots on the schedules, so please get in touch.

We are particularly keen to invite guest speakers along to meetings, and are a willing test audience for any talks and presentations that you may be planning to present at forthcoming conferences, workshops or seminars, such as the OSCON or YAPC::Europe conferences, so whether you're visiting Birmingham or can be persuade to join us for an evening out, please get in touch. We'd be delight to have you along and present.

Submit talk proposals to: talks [at] birmingham.pm.org

Would you or your company be interested in sponsoring one or more Birmingham Perl Monger user group events?

We are currently looking for sponsors to help us promote the Birmingham Perl Monger user group, as well as Perl in general. This can be as simple as providing a room and/or projector to hold our monthly technical meetings, to liaising with us to enable Perl training from leading Perl experts from around the world. Birmingham Perl Mongers are a dedicated group of experienced international conference speakers and many of our members have been involved with the Perl community worldwide for several years.

We plan to hold an annual large scale Perl training event during the summer, similar in scale to The London Perl Workshop, with more emphasis on appealing to attendees outside of the capital. Sponsorship would be very welcome to help us fund and organise tis event, with sponsors able to be present with a stand at the event for recruiting or promotional purposes. Please contact us if you require more details.

In addition, all sponsors will get a permanent advertisement link on the event page for which they are a sponsor, (technical meeting page or special event page), as well as advertising here on the front page for the duration of their sponsorship agreement (up until at least one month after the event) and will be featured in any mailouts or promotional material advertising their sponsored event. Sponsor marketing at technical meetings can also be arranged.

If you can help, please get in touch with me, Barbie.