Presentations for 2015

Best practices serve as kind-of a short-hand for pointing the way to good programming practices. Unfortunately, there are many ways that people can misuse any given best practice to generate a bad result. G. Wade Johnson covers a few ways that best practices have gone bad in his career.

This time we had a pair of short presentations. Chris Mevissen showed the use of bitwise operators in Perl as a followup to his previous talk on BER decoding. Julian Brown was up next showing how to use the D3 JavaScript library to generate candlestick charts in SVG.

Disagreements are part of any development effort, but they don't have to be unpleasant. Robert Stone discusses how disagreements become disagreeable and strategies for you to avoid being part of the problem.

In recent years, there have been a few potential security flaws relating to serialization libraries for dynamic languages. This presentation introduces a few of these flaws and shows how they can be turned into actual attacks using Metasploit.

Many development groups use continuous integration to generate quick feedback on the quality of their software. George shows how to use the TravisCI and Coveralls.io systems to provide equivalent functionality for your Perl Modules.

Lists are a fundamental data type in Perl, unfortunately people do not make as good a use of them as they could. In this presentation, Wade gives an overview of lists and arrays and the operations that apply to each. He then went over the modules List::Util and List::MoreUtils for more advanced list operations.

This was the second in a series that JD has done on Metasploit modules attacking vulnerabilities in Perl code. This presentation focused on problems with the Locale::Maketext module. JD shows background on the flaw, how it manifests in Locale::Maketext, and the module he built to perform the exploit.

Julian Brown showed how he summarizes currency trades from a delayed Forex feed into different groupings. His method involves both string manipulation and use of the DateTime module.

Nicolas Rochelemagne summarized the presentations he saw at this year's YAPC::EU. The talks spanned a fairly large spectrum of topics.

Jim Bacon gave a remote presentation describing how he used applied Roles to adapt a CGI::Application-based webapp to support a versioned API.

Todd Rinaldo followed this with a presentation describing what Pelr programmers should know about UTF-8 including information about various gotchas.

The idea of this meeting was to have each attendee present a few tips or picks that they found interesting or helpful. The picks ranged from book recommendations and podcasts, to personal projects, to libraries and tools. Most picks generated questions and discussion.