Houston.pm

JD Does an early trial run of his talk about auditing CPAN modules for vulnerabilities. He covers both techniques for simple security audits and the process of responsible disclosure of those vulnerabilities to the author.

Many interesting projects come out of someone scratching their own itch. Jay Vogt presented a web-based program for querying a bug-tracking system he uses at work. Although the original system allowed people to enter all of the information needed to track issues, the query interface was not powerful enough for some needs.

Many people use Perl for manipulating text files. Erin explains several of her favorite small techniques in this area.

Fraser has a business providing a web-based administration system for businesses providing CAM services. In this talk, he presents some details on the Perl code that drives the system.

Mark presented an overview of using the git version control system with an emphasis on what the average Perl Hacker needs to know. Since this was a preview of the talk he planned to give at OSCON, the audience was able to help improve the talk. The audience was a good mix of people with little or no git experience as well as old-hands. The audience appeared to enjoy the talk and enjoyed helping in the improvements.

Wade presented more high-level testing tools and strategies for testing, rather than the normal introduction to Perl unit testing which we have done in the past.

Mark indulged his curiosity about which Platform as a Service providers do a good job of supporting Perl.

Reini describes a script he uses to test a large number of Perl versions as part of the development of the Perl compiler.

brian was back in Houston and volunteered to give an early look at the "Advanced Modulinos" talk he plans for the summer conference season. The modulino technique arose as a way to make scripts more testable. In this presentation, brian explains how to convert a script into a modulino as well as best practices for refactoring to make it more testable and flexible. Since the presentation was not complete at the time of the presentation, brian then lead a discussion about other techniques and ideas that the group could identify for better modulinos. brian also talked quite a bit about his history and how he came to be the developer and author he is today.

Mark Allen introduced the Dist::Zilla distribution building module from the point of view of someone who is new to the module.

Nicolas presented an overview of object oriented programming in Perl. After covering the basics, he surveyed the different Perl modules that provide support for OO in Perl.

Perl programs are normally compiled from script into memory and executed without a separate compilation step. The standard distribution once had a program that could compile as Perl script into a standalone executable. In this talk, Reini Urban describes the Perl compiler and some of the issues with updating this program to modern Perl versions.

Next, Jake described some work he has done recently for converting ranges of IP addresses in various forms into a set of IP addresses. This talk was more low-level than most presentations.

Finally, we had a series of lightning talks that covered several different topics.