The Perl Foundation

Frozen Perl 2008 Call for Speakers

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 20:41:36 +0000

Frozen Perl 2008 will be a one-day workshop in sunny Minneapolis on Saturday, February 16, 2008. We've officially opened up our Call for Speakers, and we're looking forward to your submissions. Our workshop theme is "Perl in Practice", so practical submissions are encouraged. Andy mentioned in an earlier post that registration isn't open and would "definitely be under $100". Registration is still not open, but I wanted to add that the early bird price is likely to be $20 for non-students and $10 for students. We're also working on providing a one-day Perl Intro to Perl class the day before for a very reasonable price, which we're very excited about.

Perl-Based MediaWiki Syntax Parser

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:06:58 +0000

Following on from the success of his recent XML::RSS grant, Shlomi Fish has been awarded another grant to create a reusable parser for the syntax of MediaWiki, the popular open-source wiki engine that powers sites such as Wikipedia and Wikiquote. The deliverables of the grant are a CPAN module and a Kwiki plugin for using this MediaWiki syntax in Kwiki wikis, enabling people to create Perl projects that can parse its syntax and create compatible wikis. Shlomi's progress will be documented in future entries of this blog.

Frozen Perl 2008 announced for February 16th, 2008

Sun, 02 Sep 2007 00:28:59 +0000

The Minneapolis Perl Mongers have announced the date of their one-day Perl workshop. Mark your calendars now for Frozen Perl 2008 February 16th, 2008.

Frozen Perl will be an all-day workshop held at the University of Minnesota. Pricing has not yet been announced, but I'm sure it will be under $100.

If, like me, you found it to be a bit too far to get to the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop on October 13-14, 2007, this is a great alternative. I hope to see you there.

YAPC::NA in Chicago...again!

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:52:49 +0000

Chicago.pm has stepped up to be first group in recent years to bid for a repeat YAPC, and in close voting they nudged out Columbus for the opportunity to do it. Jonathan Rockway will be the head organizer, with support from previous Chicago organizers Josh McAdams and Pete Krawczyk. Both groups submitted strong bids and it was a tough choice. Watch for more announcements with final dates and other details. See you in Chicago!

Perl Foundation needs you to chair the Grant Committee

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 04:28:11 +0000

After a running the Perl Foundation Grant Committee for almost two years, Ovid has decided he needs to step down. Naturally, this means we need someone to step into this role and we're hoping to get new people into the Perl Foundation.

Running the Grant Committee is a very important volunteer position with specific responsibilities. These include:

Every three months, putting out a call for grant proposals and organizing votes on them.
Finding and retaining grant managers to oversee grants which are awarded.
Keep abreast of important trends in the Perl community.
Work the Grant and Steering committee to help shape Perl Foundation policy.
Keep the news.perlfoundation.org blog updated with regular events happening with the grant committee.

This role requires:

A good understanding of the needs of the Perl community.
Thick skin ("why did you morons approve X?", "You aren't funding enough grants!", "You are funding too many grants", etc.)
Patience. Sometimes the wheels turn slowly.
Discretion (never publicly discuss rejected grants. Respect privacy)
Tact (you have to let rejected grantees down gently while telling them why their grant was rejected)

Aside from the above, we like to see initiative on the part Grant Committee Secretary. New ideas, grant-related or not, that help the Perl Foundation better serve the Perl community are always welcome. To help the transition, Ovid has volunteered to help the new Grant Secretary get to his or her feet and answer any questions which might arise.

If you're looking for a way to make an impact in the Perl community, and help the Perl Foundation drive Perl development, the Grant Committee chair position may be for you. If you're interested, email Richard Dice at rdice at perlfoundation.org. We hope to hear from you soon.

2007 White Camels awarded

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 17:32:34 +0000

The 2007 White Camel awards for contributions to the Perl community were awarded at OSCON.

Norbert E. Grüner, for years of service helping to organize conferences and workshops throughout Europe, as chair of The YAPC::Europe Foundation.
Allison Randal, as leader and manager of Perl 6 & Parrot, plus her revisions to Perl's Artistic License.
Tim O'Reilly, for O'Reilly Media's long-time support of the Perl community, back to to 1997 with the first Perl Conference, which has since morphed into OSCON.

Thanks to all the winners.

Perl Foundation Grant Time Again

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:58:30 +0000

If you have an idea for doing some work for the Perl community and you think it's worthy of a grant, please send your grant entry to tpf-proposals@perl-foundation.org by the end of August. We will be awarding the grants by the beginning of October.

YAPC::NA::2008 Chicago.pm Bid

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:23:14 +0000

Read on for the Chicago.pm bid. The formatting suffered a bit on this one too.

YAPC::NA::2008 Columbus.pm Bid

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:15:19 +0000

Read on for the full Columbus bid. Note that the version we received was nicely formatted, especially the tables. When I copied from the PDF, I lost the formatting.

Call for Venue Closed

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:07:02 +0000

The call for venue for YAPC::NA::2008 is closed. We received two bids, a rebid from Chicago and a first-time bid from Columbus.pm. I'll be posting the bid details shortly. The Conferences Committee will then begin the review and voting.

Help the Perl community better understand its users at perlsurvey.org

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 07:53:53 +0000

What sort of programmer uses Perl? Do most Perl programmers use it as a primary language, or just write the occasional script? And are there really as few women as conventional wisdom says? Kirrily Robert wants to know, and wants anyone around the world who uses Perl to help by answering a simple five-minute survey at perlsurvey.org.

Kirrily's goal is to "take a snapshot of the Perl world as it currently stands." As an active member of the Perl community, she's often asked questions about Perl's users and is only left to "hypothesise, generalise, and hand-wave." Further, software communities can often be an echo chamber where people only hear from like-minded people. The Perl Survey is an attempt to break out of that echo chamber and hear from all Perl users around the world, regardless of skill level, not just the core users most active in vocal communities.

An interesting part of the survey is asking the respondent's salary, if they choose to release it. "I hear a lot of talk about the going rate for Perl programmers," Kirrily says, "and whether organizations that claim they can't hire Perl programmers simply aren't paying enough." Correlating results with the other data points could shed light on the topic. The survey's reach could also help users around the world. "Salary information can be very hard to find out for anywhere other than the US," says Kirrily, an Australian.

The survey will be open until September 30, 2007. Then, in October, Kirrily will be announcing the results and releasing the raw data, minus email addresses, under a Creative Commons "CC-BY" license. Her hope is that other interested people will provide their own analyses of the results.

For further information, and to participate if you use Perl at all, visit perlsurvey.org.

The Perl Foundation is at OSCON

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:16:13 +0000

Got a question about The Perl Foundation? Want to volunteer some time for The Perl Foundation? Come see us on the floor in the Expo Hall at OSCON. We're right next to the massage booth!

ProhibitComplexMapping Policy Released

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 12:05:08 +0000

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Chris Dolan's Policies for Perl::Critic grant, awarded April 07, is now underway. Chris intends to add twenty policies that are inspired by Damian Conway's Perl Best Practices to Perl::Critic to help developers to make their code more maintainable. Chris has written the first of the twenty policies funded by the grant, Perl::Critic::Policy::BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitComplexMapping, which insists that the block argument to map() has at most one statement. Further details of the policies Chris intends to implement can be found in Perl::Critic's POD. You can also track Chris's work at http://perlcritic.tigris.org/svn/perlcritic/branches/Perl-Critic-1.xxx

Parrot Grant Update - May and June

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 23:03:14 +0000

May and June saw the usual monthly releases of Parrot, 0.4.12 and 0.4.13. Between these two releases, there were numerous language updates, including PHP and Lisp. On the Perl 6 front, 0.4.13 was the first release where Parrot passed the Perl 6 sanity tests. This is an exciting achievement, because it means that Parrot supports enough of Perl 6 that the developers can start using Perl 6 to bootstrap its own implementation. There were also many improvements to the Parrot internals, notably on the object implementation, as well as smaller improvements in the garbage collector, memory leak fixing, and general cleanup. The object work focused on implementing the new object metamodel documented in PDD15 and switching current object code to this new metamodel. On the design side, there was significant work on the design for PMCs (PDD17), and Allison expects this to be finalized soon. Parrot had a strong presence at the recent YAPC::NA conference in Houston, TX. There was almost a full day of talks devoted to Parrot, including presentations by chromatic, Project Manager Will Coleda, Patrick Michaud, and Parrot Architect Allison Randal. No milestone payments were approved during this period.

Reminder: Call for Venue--YAPC::NA::2008 deadline

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 20:31:29 +0000

The deadline for submitting your venue bids for this year is approaching. I know there are some folks out there working on bids, so don't count on us going into overtime. The due date is August 1. You can find more details in this year's call and the previous call.