NEILB's Blog

We often talk about "The Perl Community", but I don't think it exists. Instead what we have is a loose, and at times fraught, federation of communities. Over the last few weeks I've been thinking and talking about this a lot, so I wanted to share some of those thoughts, and hear what others think. This is not me trying to tell you how things are, but how I see things, and also to outline some things that I think might help us be less fraught.

At the London Perl Workshop, we've often had cupcakes and the like during one of the coffee breaks. LEONT suggested that I bake 200 muffins, but I couldn't see how to get that many in on the train. It did prompt an idea though: could we crowd-source cakes, cookies, and muffins from the attendees?

Hacktoberfest is an annual event where if you do four pull requests in the month of October you'll get a free t-shirt. Why not do your pull requests on CPAN distributions, for example to fix a bug, increase coverage of the test suite, or improve the documentation.

I went to the London Perl Workshop yesterday. It was the usual excellent mix of good talks, catching up with old friends, and making some new ones. It was also the 10th and final LPW organised by Mark Keating. I came away reminded that what makes a languages isn't really the language, it's an ecosystem for sharing code (CPAN) and the community. And what a great community we have!

I think we should do more to encourage people to speak at our conferences and workshops. Specifically people who've never given a talk. I think there are a number of things we can do to encourage them, and one of the ideas I had was to talk to people who are widely accepted to be good speakers, and see what they had to say. This is the start of a series of posts, based on those conversations.

If you've never given a talk at a Perl conference or workshop, but would like to, the YAPC::NA videos are a good source of inspiration and how (not) to give a talk. Watch a bunch of videos and make brief notes: distil these down into guidance for yourself.

I sometimes ponder on how we can encourage people to become more active in the Perl communities. Following feedback from participants in the Pull Request Challenge, it's clear we could make many of our CPAN distributions more contribution-friendly. A recent blog post and some discussion with Sawyer prompted some specific ideas.

Prompted by some tweets from Su-Shee, I've been thinking about women speakers at Perl conferences, and in particular for keynotes at YAPC::EU this year. These are some thoughts on how we might be able to address this.

I went to the London Perl Workshop yesterday. Lots of good talks and also a chance to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. Thanks to all the organisers and volunteers (and speakers!) who helped make it such a worthwhile day.

A bit later than usual, this is a quick look at the number of CPAN pull requests that were done in May 2015. A noticeable drop from previous months, but still more than in any month before 2015. Just.