use Perl

Last night Birmingham.pm held there monthly technical meeting. It was just me and Brian doing a preview of our YAPC::Europe talks. Brian's came in at 19mins, mine around 25mins. I think I need to trim a few more slides.

I'm now wondering who I'm going to go up against. If it's somebody good, I might not get a big attendance, which will be good for my nerves, but then I might not get the interest I was hoping for to take the distribution(s) further. Still if I only get one person's feedback, it'll be worth it. The guys at Birmingham.pm, seem to feel I got the right amount of info in there, not too technical, but enough to get the idea across of what I'm doing and why.

After the meeting, we descended on the pub for a debrief session. Brian, Jon, David, JJ and I settled down for a healthy session. We're all looking forward to Belfast, and virtually have everything sorted. We're mostly on the same flights and in the same hotel, so we've decided to try and organise everything so we can meet up at both airports and try and share taxis. The London Lads aren't flying mostly until later in the evening, so we'll still have plenty of Guinness time ahead of them. Our aim is to arrive at the hotel and dump stuff off. Then head for the conference centre, pre-register (if its open) and the find the recommended bar (assuming the Belfast folks have picked one), and settle in for the night. Then hopefully have a good chance to catch up with friends old and new throughout the evening.

The Belfast trip is also a bit of a triple celebration for us. It'll be Birmingham.pm's 4th birthday, my 39th and Steve's 30th. We're planning on enjoying the week :) The week before is our traditional social (2nd Wednesday of the month), but yet again we'll be decamping to Wolverhampton. My excuse is that we want to be seen as a truly West Midlands user group, but the reality is that Wolves LUG are a good bunch of guys, for some members its easier to get to, and probably most importantly ... I love a good curry :) Be warned, when YAPC::Europe hits Birmingham, you'll be enticed into a damn fine Balti.

Towards the end of the evening the subject got around to my DBI::Recorder post yesterday. JJ, David and I discussed a few thoughts on how I could attempt it, in particular the testing portion. What happens if a module needs to skip a set of tests. With a bit of thought I decided that a synchronisation call was needed. We discuss how the data would be represented and JJ pointed out that it ought to be able to handle multiple connections to different databases. I'm not entire sure whether I'll be able to implement that, but it certainly will be in the TODO list. After some more research I may even do a lightning talk on it, and see if I can get some more help and advice. It certainly seems worth pursuing.