Houston.pm

This meeting was intended to be another hack-a-thon for those people who had projects to work on. For those relatively new to Perl, Wade was going to run a help session to answer questions and go over Perl basics.

Brett explains how to use the Redis data store as a work queue. Many of the features of Redis support producer-consumer queuing.

We opened the conference room for anyone to work on their projects or help others as a Hack-a-thon. Unlike the previous attempt, no official project was specified that we would work on.

Reini Urban covered some of the background and low-level details of one of the efforts to modernize the compiler and run-time for Perl 5.

Charles Boyd introduces the Pari/GP library and discusses how its design makes creating bindings to the library easier. He also discusses some current Perl bindings to the library, as well as future directions for this work.

JD Does an early trial run of his talk about auditing CPAN modules for vulnerabilities. He covers both techniques for simple security audits and the process of responsible disclosure of those vulnerabilities to the author.

Many interesting projects come out of someone scratching their own itch. Jay Vogt presented a web-based program for querying a bug-tracking system he uses at work. Although the original system allowed people to enter all of the information needed to track issues, the query interface was not powerful enough for some needs.

Many people use Perl for manipulating text files. Erin explains several of her favorite small techniques in this area.

Fraser has a business providing a web-based administration system for businesses providing CAM services. In this talk, he presents some details on the Perl code that drives the system.

Mark presented an overview of using the git version control system with an emphasis on what the average Perl Hacker needs to know. Since this was a preview of the talk he planned to give at OSCON, the audience was able to help improve the talk. The audience was a good mix of people with little or no git experience as well as old-hands. The audience appeared to enjoy the talk and enjoyed helping in the improvements.

Wade presented more high-level testing tools and strategies for testing, rather than the normal introduction to Perl unit testing which we have done in the past.

Mark indulged his curiosity about which Platform as a Service providers do a good job of supporting Perl.

Reini describes a script he uses to test a large number of Perl versions as part of the development of the Perl compiler.