use Perl

On Wednesday we had the Birmingham.pm Technical Meeting. Except as I wasn't prepared to run around trying to organise talks, the others decided we should have a code review night.

It had been thought about before, but now seemed the ideal opportunity to give it a whirl. I was a bit unsure of how well it would go, but was game to try it out. Possibly due to the snow, and a couple crying off due to illness, it wasn't as well attended as I'd hoped. Still there were about 8 of us there, so it certainly wasn't a bad turn out.

Myself, Brian and JJ all offered code to review, but being ill-prepared for how we should do it, only JJ got to get some good ideas for improving the code. Next time, those of us putting forward code for review, will publish it at least a week beforehand to give everyone a chance to glance over it. I still feel it was a worthwhile exercise and am keen to try it out later in the year, when we have another slow month of talks.

Joining us for the night was Allison Randal, who was in Birmingham for the UKUUG conference. It was great to see her again, and she said she enjoyed the evening, though it was a shame she didn't see us on a more rowdy social night. Then again perhaps it was a good idea that she didn't see us on a rowdy night.

The night finished with several rounds of Fluxx, which if memory serves I think I lost every round. No, no sorry got that wrong ... I won every round.

Best part of the night though, was when we fired up the laptops to discover someone had provided us with a completely open wireless network ... including default passwords to the router! We'll be keeping quite about that and trying again at the social in a couple of weeks. Could be handy to know for future meetings :)