Houston.pm

A group of us hang out on Zoom and talk about whatever comes to mind.

We'll hear from Evan Carroll about a project he's working on, and any other subjects we think to discuss.

Julian Brown covers the basics of SQL in this fundamentals talk.

Making the best use of Perl includes understanding and using its data structures. G. Wade Johnson will present the major Perl data structures, dipping slightly into implementation, but focusing mostly on the effective use of those structures.

John Lightsey will present an early version of a talk he has scheduled for The Perl and Raku Conference this year. The talk will cover using fuzzing in analysis of the Perl interpreter. If you have interest in security, Perl, or fuzz testing, this will be the talk for you.

Except in the case of simple standalone scripts, Perl applications usually consist of multiple modules and the perl executable. In this discussion, we want to cover some of the ways you can deploy a Perl application to any environment.

Evan Carroll covers another aspect of testing in Perl by mocking constants.

Wade gives a different regular expression talk, focusing on how to use them instead of focusing on the syntax.

Evan Carroll covers some of the reasons for using an Object Oriented paradigm when programming. He shows how Perl and a few other languages implement the appropriate concepts.

Instead of a presentation, this is more of a question and answer session about Object Oriented Programming.

Wade starts with some unit testing basics, introduces some of the Perl unit test frameworks, and then focuses on concepts and tricks to help you get more from your unit tests. While not attempting to cover the whole subject of unit testing, there should be something here for most.

Julian Brown describes his experiences with the Test::Spec unit testing framework.

Julian Brown will be exploring the usage of the Arangodb NoSQL database as used a website he's working on.

Robert Stone will do a demo of OpenShift, showing some of the high points of functionality.

Read the documentation, we're told, but there's always more to learn. When I started working with Dancer2, DBIx::Class, and Template Toolkit last fall, I'd seen the basics, but I found out very quickly that there's much more to learn. The capabilities of this stack can influence application design from the ground up database tables, all the way to the final frameworks you might choose to use on the frontend, and not all of those repercussions are immediately clear from merely reading the documentation! In this talk, we'll learn about some of the strengths of these modules and demonstrate how their capabilities can be leveraged to help you work faster and write great web-based applications.

G. Wade Johnson has been maintaining the Houston.pm website for years. Over time, he wrote a bit of code to make maintaining the site easier. In this presentation, he explains that code.

J. D. Lightsey describes how he has used Ansible as a workflow system to automate processes for some personal servers.

Nicolas Rochelemagne gave a little retrospective of 2018. He included a best of section and some lessons he learned concerning DistZilla and XS.

Robert Stone presented a comparison between the monolithic style of architecture and a microservices style. He highlighted the benefits of the microservices style to show the advantages of a change.

G. Wade Johnson presents the results of some benchmarking of different approaches to parsing short text strings.

Julian Brown explores the usage of the Arangodb NoSQL database as used a website he's working on.

Mark Allen decided to cut back on his Twitter use. Since he now needed a new smartphone activity, he turned to DuoLingo and began studying Russian. This lead to the construction of a Perl module to handle declining Russian pronouns, adjectives, and nouns.

Julian Brown described attempting to add a feature to a tool for synchronizing bookmarks. In the process, he learned about ECMAScript 8. This presentation explores what he learned.

J. D. Lightsey gave a quick overview of the concept of Threat Modeling and demonstrated approaches for doing threat modeling.

G. Wade Johnson demonstrates a simple web application built in both Ruby on Rails and Dancer2 on Perl.

This month was a pair of presentations. Mark Gardner described building a robot project for a GEMS conference. JD Lightsey followed up with a dive into security flaws in the AWStats program.