Perl Oasis and LPW2011 Videos: Some Personal Recommendations

In the previous three weeks it has been a pleasure to be able to finally get both the videos for the London Perl Workshop 2011 and the 2012 Perl Oasis videos up on Presenting Perl for the enjoyment of a wider audience.

It is at this point that I can hold out a few interesting videos for people to look for.

It would be nice if I could sit in the position of having watched all the videos, but the editing of presentations is such that one sees quite a lot of the first five minutes and final three minutes, there is no editing as such, the audio and video should stay normalised so the rest of a video is generally left unwatched by the editor, it can be left in the background while performing other tasks.

Therefore like everyone else I must sit down and purposefully find the time to watch the videos all the way through. Something which is a guilty pleasure as I do not need to see them streamed across the Internet but can power up a higher quality original.

The following list then are the few recordings I have managed to see live and one or two others that I have viewed since then, I highly recommend that you watch all the videos if you can, I certainly plan to find the time to if possible.

London Perl Workshop 2011

To begin with the uncomparable Zefram takes us for a stroll through Why Time is Difficult, this is aimed at the casually curious and discusses why it is not just hard to code for time but to understand it at all.

Matt Trout introduces us to some evil in his Lightning Talk Because and also to some usual deep delving into what we can do with Perl as a system admin wishing to access remote systems in What Tak Did.

Mike Whitaker didn’t disappoint on the day with a whole brace of talks, but check out Using PPI for Refactoring and Stop Scratching a call to not keep shaving those yaks.

David Leadbeater once again showed the way with Uniqueness a wonderful lightning talk that secures his reputation for wowing people.

While we are on the subject of Lightning talks do take the time to watch Leon Brocard’s wonderful Lightning Talks Introduction which as always was full of well judged humour, a lightning talk in itself.

For those of us who like Old School tools that can still give great value, and more power, in the modern world should seek out Andrew Ford’s masterful instruction for Latex to EPub with Perl.

Finally there is the fabulous Dave Cross who once again proves that satire is throroughly engrained in the English psyche with the brilliant A Modest Proposal, I never knew that as marketing bod for various Perl things I was in competition with this luminary of the Perlverse.

That’s the lot for LPW, I will work my way through more in the coming weeks/months.

Perl Oasis 2012

This was a fast job for me (turned the videos around in a week from arriving back home) so I have seen less of them, thankfully however I did see some of these live so can recommend:

A Brave New Perl World, Stevan Little tells us why this is an exciting time for Perl core development and to be working in the language.

Chrestomathies by Bruce Gray introduced me to a new word and a competition that we all should be gaming.

Doing the Jitterbug was a great introduction to Continuous Integration for me and I discovered even more about how knowledgeable the great “Duke” really is (you still owe me more whisky btw).

Organising Technical Groups in Meatspace has some great insights and tips to all of us who run a technical group and have issues, Dylan had to overcome a lot of problems in order to get his local group working well and he shares his insights and what these have taught him.

Chris Nehren proved finally that he can get that wry sense of humour he has into his talks with the great lightning talk Software Failure Modes while Rocco does an entire massive talk in 5 minutes in What You Missed and John SJ Anderson impressed with Tweakers Anonymous.

Finally a great deal of fun and a good message was delivered by Cory G. Watson in his Keynote, well worth listening to eventhough there is no sign of Cory due to video cropping issues.

Again there are so many more videos that I am going to have to catch up with.

If any of you are interested I gave a talk on Marketing (part two) at the Perl Oasis and Matt S. Trout and I gave a talk on the Tuesday after we got back from Orlando in Manchester on Business and Community in which we discuss how as a business you can embrace the community (Mark), and as a developer you can immerse yourself in the community (Matt), that may be worth a look if you are either of those people or wishing to start a business based on free software and open source models for commerce.

-mdk