The Ann Arbor Perl Mongers are a great, and still building steam, group of guys (no girls yet) that love perl. Dan and I went down to Ann Arbor for April’s meeting, and had a great time.

In April:

* Tommy Staton gave a presentation on ‘Syncing your ~ with Git’. It was well done, and somewhat controversial, and I learned a TON about Git, which is kind of awesome. Too, he used Voom (which allows you to write and show presentations in Vim) to write his presentation, and with my love of Vim, it was easy to like him.

* Jamie Pitts – gave a presentation about “Boilerplate Web Apps” (downloads his presentation) about Catalyst::Helper, which was incredibly detailed and quite revolutionary for me but… went immediately over my head. As a side note, I really REALLY need to learn Perl (which, incidentally, apparently is three classes deep in the Computer Sciences department at LCC… JUST GIVE ME A DAMN CLASS ON PERL)

This month Liquid Web (by which I mean me) offered to host the meeting. I asked our devteam if they wanted to present anything, and, to put it simply, they are far too busy with things I want them to be doing for LW. It was coming down to it, and it was becoming bloody apparent: I was going to have to present something. To the Perl Mongers.

Me. Who doesn’t know perl. ….shiiiiiiii.

But then my (quickly becoming good) buddy Mark suggested I talk about what I do know: why Perl Enthusiasts need to be their own Evangelists. I was 3/4 of the way through building that when Jamie (from the last meeting, remember?) and Mike Mol both offered to present, and my lead dev tells me that this topic was covered three months ago, at the same group.

SAVED!

Organize the event?! I can do that in my sleep.

Pizza, soda, technology, and places to sit. That’s all I had to come up with.

This Month:

* Jamie presented on the Architecture of a well written, multi-layer (and sometimes multi-application) perl application. It definitely engaged the LW devs and Engineering folk that made it out. This time I actually followed along with the concepts, but as soon as he started giving examples he lost me (have I mentioned how it would be a good idea to learn perl?). It was a good presentation, though.

* Mike Mol talked about his extremely cool project: Rosetta Code, which is exactly what you’d think it was. The base idea: write the same function/program/concept in as many different languages as you can. While relatively simple in concept, it is a huge undertaking. He’s grown his own community, and faced his challenges, and it was a joy watching him interact with my beloved engineering geeks.

After we broke (best two hours ever), I took the four out-of-towners on a tour of LW, showing them the one section of servers, and the huge generators, and the Awe-Inspiring that is the Datacenter I typically take for granted. They had questions about all sorts of statistics I haven’t committed to memory yet (Mental note: learn about the electrical infrastructure), but it was a spectacular end to the night.

All in all, it was an inspiring, tiring, and overall … experience. I’m amazed at, no matter how many times I do things like this, I always learn something new, or think of something I should have done differently or better.

A++ would do again.