From the London Perl Workshop to Tech Mesh

London Perl Workshop

A cold, wet Saturday morning saw me once again making my way to Westminster University for the London Perl Workshop. Even though there were a lot of floods in the west counties, I got a train very quickly to Paddington and promptly got lost. Found my way and before I even got in the building was welcomed by Piers Cawley, parking his little car in front. I started to really feel at home. I won’t describe the setting up – you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Suffice to say that I met some good, old friends –

• Mark Keating from Shadowcat Systems Ltd, organiser of the LPW and Perl marketing guru
• Dave Cross from Magnum Solutions, seasoned Perl tutor and author of two successful Perl books
• Michele Beltram, organizer of the Italian Perl workshop
• Laurent Boivin – the man with the money of the Mongueurs de Perl
• Liz and Wendy from the Netherlands – not only the most respected duo of the Perl community but always so generous. Liz and Wendy, if you are reading this post please be assured that my family and I will toast you on New Year’s Eve with the nice wine of Perl.

The list could go on for a long time but it is enough to say that I spent a great day with old friends. I also learnt that Piers is writing a little book for us.

Tech Mesh

I have been to Erlang meetings before but Tech Mesh is not just Erlang – it encompasses all functional programming languages. I have met a lot of new interesting people and a few O’Reilly and Pragmatic Bookshelf authors:

• Francesco Cesarini from Erlang Solutions, organizer and also co-author of Erlang Programming
• Joe Armstrong (a.k.a. the grumpy lovely old man), Programming Erlang
• Dean Wampler – Programming Scala, Functional Programming for Java Developers, Programming Hive and many more
• Phil Wadler – Java Generics and Collections
• Jim Webber – REST in Practice, and I understand is presently writing another book with Ian Robinson – more on that at a later date.
• Bruce Tate, author of this event’s bestselling title – Seven Languages in Seven Weeks.

I also met Pieter Hintjens whose upcoming book ZeroMQ should hopefully be ready for Fosdem.

One of the main attractions was the meeting of the grandpas of Erlang (with a combined 183 years of programming): Joe Armstrong, Mike Williams and Robert Virding.

Oops! almost forgot to mention the meeting of the 3 Haskell gurus’ keynote – John Hughes, Simon Peyton Jones and Philip Wadler –  Haskell: Practical as well as Cool.