FOSDEM 2011 and Perl

I think the upgraded Perl presence at FOSDEM was very successful. We had a booth at the entrance of the main building. Lots of people passed by, saw Meeltje, the world famous camel, took pictures and talked to us. We also had a well attended dev-room with 13 talks.

Let me first say a huge thanks to all the speakers and especially to Karl Moens who volunteered to be in the dev-room all the day and take care of it.

I'd also like to thank all the people who helped at Perl booth. You are really great!

I have collected all the blog posts I noticed regarding Perl and FOSDEM. (If I missed any, please let me know). I think it's great that more and more people are enthusiastic about the idea of getting up and talking to people who are not (yet) going to Perl events. I'd like to encourage you to read those blog posts as well.

I am sure we need to improve a lot in our way of presentation and in our message but having more of us exposed to the questions people are asking will help us form our message. It certainly will help us understand how they see us.

It already helps to overcome some of the misunderstandings and eliminate the lack of information.

For example there was a group of for young gentleman who would not say what is their "language of choice". One of them was very "anti-Perl" but the others, when you talked to them separately, looked interested in what we explained. I even invited them to come to the Perl 6 presentation I gave the next day but they could not get up that early. Oh well.

I collected the slides of all the talks in the order they were given:

• Gabor Szabo: Using Perl 6 today
• Damien Krotkine: Curses::Toolkit - modern toolkit for old-school GUIs
• Mark Overmeer: Perl Data Structures
• David Leadbeater: Tracing Perl with DTrace/SystemTap
• Stefan Hornburg: Template::Zoom - Modern HTML and PDF Engine
• Sawyer X: Moose - A Postmodern Object System for Perl 5
• Alex Balhatchet: Introduction to Writing Readable and Maintainable Perl
• Gabor Szabo: Padre, the Perl IDE
• Paulo Edgar Castro: Packaging Perl
• Mark Overmeer: XML::Compile
• Sawyer X: Dancer - A Modern Perl Micro Web-Framework
• Frank Cuny: SPORE (pdf) (SPORE (slideshare)
• Alexis Sukrieh: Code, Release, Market

Meeltje (the camel) is mentioned in the 152th edition of FLOSS Wekly at 34:14.

And she is featured in a number of pictures. first alone.

Then together with Gooey the WebGUI octopus

Finally Slonik, the PostgreSQL elephant has also joined.

Some of the pictures also include the incredible Perl library of Liz and Wendy.

Fliers

We already had some fliers. One explaing how Perl can be used in the QA department to Test Anything

Another one was about Padre, the Perl editor/IDE. That was much more eye catching as it had the blue butterfly on it. So we better add color and a picture to the other fliers as well.

The third flier was about Perl Ecosystem Group explaining our objectives and showing all of our members and sponsors.

For the next even we should improve the current fliers and create a few more.

I hope we made some impact and next year it will be even more awesome to present Perl and Perl based projects at FOSDEM.