Talks

Pittsburgh Perl Mongers

The Pittsburgh Perl Mongers group is a fantastic bunch of friendly software developers who meet monthly to discuss interesting developments in the Perl, software, technical, and beverage worlds. Truly, the kind of folks that serious yet fun-loving developers ought to seek out.

I have given a few talks for the Perl Mongers:

• Talks/Fun with Numbers – R and Perl (and IMDB data). An introduction to the R statistics system and how to use it (with Perl) to analyze IMDB ratings data.
• Talks/Testing Tips with LectroTest. Some great tips on using LectroTest to make your programming life better.
• Talks/Embedding an XHTML-template language into Perl. A quick talk about embedded domain-specific languages. Uses Perl and a tiny XML-construction language as subjects.
• Talks/Ruby and Ruby on Rails – A Perlish First Impression. My first impressions of Ruby and RoR after a one-month project.
• Talks/Fun with AutoCurry. A quick talk on a module I hacked up to give Perl currying-like function call semantics.
• Talks/Radio VCR plus iPod equals NPR to Go. How I used an old radio and some otherwise idle server time to build up an archive of NPR broadcasts, which I then "podcast" to my iPod for later listening.
• Talk - Free Unit Tests In Perl with LectroTest. In this talk I introduced an automated, specification-based testing tool for Perl that I have been working on. This talk, and LectroTest itself are also in the LectroTest portion of the site.
• Talk - Fun with Asterisk and Perl. In this talk I set up a small network of VoIP telephones using the open-source Asterisk PBX system. Then I showed how you can do some amazing stuff with this simple setup and a little Perl code.
• Talk - Haskell for Perl Hackers. One of my favorite programming languages is Haskell. The Perl Mongers, being open-minded folks, asked me to tell them why I like it. This talk was my attempt to do just that.
• Talk - Functional Templates in Perl. I like functional programming, and I like Perl. Here's a talk in which I showed how you could put the two together to yield a simple, powerful template system. The idea is that you can use a simple transformation to turn templates inside-out, which yields things that look a lot like functions. Then, using the functional-programming idea of currying, we can combine these "functional templates" in a way that lets us easily build the kind of complex templates that many modern web sites require.