Past Talks

Here is a list of past Vancouver.pm talks, brought over from the previous site incarnation.

February 2006

This month’s meeting (see details below) was preceeded at 6 (pizza
at 5:30) by the Vancouver XML Developers Association meeting in which
Jost Klopfstein of Axos Technologies will present “The Power of
Personalized Business Communications using Open Standards (How XSL-FO
Can Work For Me)”. See here for more
details. Mongers are welcome to attend both.

When: Wednesday February 22, 2006, 7:30pm

Where: ActiveState/Sophos, 580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

Speakers and Topics:

Alex Pavlovic and Slobodan Miskovic will present Catalyst, Ajax and Web 2.0. Are we there yet?
This talk will focus on using Catalyst and AJAX to deliver the look and feel of a desktop application in a browser. We will briefly cover the basics of the Catalyst model-view-controller structure, and then see how to use javascript and Catalyst actions to create powerful user interactions. There will be time for questions.

Alex Pavlovic
Mr. Pavlovic graduated in 1999 from Camosun College in
Computer Science and has been working as a developer in Canada since 1994. In
the last few years, he has worked heavily with open source web based
technologies, especially emerging W3C recommendations and standards. Currently
Mr. Pavlovic is exploring new web development concepts and strategies that
bring much needed functionality into the browser itself, and that could
ultimately replace desktop applications.

Slobodan Miskovic
Mr. Miskovic, a recent graduate from SFU’s
Computer Science program, has been doing web development for 8 years, and
is a rapid adopter of new technologies. Currently he is an independent
contractor who enjoys exploring the wonderful world of Web2.0 as seen from the
Catalyst perspective.

January 2006

When: Thursday January 26, 2006 7:00pm

Where: ActiveState/Sophos, 580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

Speakers and Topics:

Gurusamy Sarathy: “What we learned using Perl to develop PureMessage”

Sarathy has been heavily involved in maintaining the mainstream releases
of Perl for the past seven years. He served as the Release Manager for
the 5.005 and 5.6 releases of Perl.

Sarathy conceived and implemented the original PureMessage product. He is
currently responsible for the overall technical success of PureMessage,
and the mentorship of key development skills at Sophos Vancouver.

Will Whittaker: Multi-lingual support in Catalyst

Will Whittaker has helped to organize CanSecWest since 2000. He designed
and authored the security conference’s registration system, which handles
multiple languages and currencies. Will spoke at Perl Conference 4.0 and
at YAPC::EU in 2003 through 2005.

November 2005

When: Thursday November 24, 2005

Where: ActiveState/Sophos, 580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

Speakers:

Luke Closs: Selenium, a web testing framework for javascript and everything else

Helen Cook: Tricks learned from MJD’s book “Higher Order Perl”

July 2005

When: 7:30 PM, Thursday, July 28, 2005

Where: ActiveState/Sophos, 580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

Speaker: Casey West

Talk: Advanced Class::DBI

Casey West is an Open Source application developer. He manages the Perl Email Project, the JavaScript Archive Network, and a host of CPAN modules.

July 2005

When: 7:30 PM, Wednesday, July 20th, 2005

Where: ActiveState/Sophos, 580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

Speaker: Kevin Scaldeferri

How to Serve a Billion Requests a Day with Perl
This presentation discusses the challenges of building complex services that can handle very high query rates with low latency and high availability. Overture, the sponsored search division of Yahoo!, has developed a number of systems that have successfully scaled over several orders of magnitude in both data volume and query rate, and Scaldeferri will discuss the ideas behind some of these.

General topics covered will include:

• Caching using local and distributed caches
• When and how to distribute your application across multiple machines
• Use of asynchronous communication techniques to increase throughput and ensure acceptable response times

Scaldeferri also discusses the interplay between different levels of abstraction, from high-level business logic, to practical Perl programming, to low-level OS and hardware behavior, and how all of these affect the design and architecture of such systems.

Kevin Scaldeferri

Kevin Scaldeferri is a lead developer at Yahoo!’s sponsored search division, Overture, where he has spent the last three years taming an ever-growing Perl code base that currently serves over one billion web requests a day. His professional interests include programming languages and software development practices. Outside work, he enjoys cooking, reading, modern art, and “challenging” music.

June 2005

This will be a series of 3 20 min presentations and should be quite interesting.
To be followed by an excursion to a nearby drinking establishment for refreshments.

When: 7:30 PM, Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Where: ActiveState/Sophos, 580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

Speakers: Ken Simpson; Helen Cook; Philippe Chiasson

Ken Simpson
Ken’s latest endeavour, MailChannels.com, plays some clever tricks with
dns, Apache and mod_perl to eliminate the false positive problem from
filtering email. Previously, as a lead developer at ActiveState (now a
division of Sophos), Ken worked on core open source development tools
and technologies. Ken has an honours degree in computer engineering from
Simon Fraser University.

Helen Cook
Helen currently works on finding signal in noise for Memotrax.com. She
was a lead programmer at mgrok Corporation from 2002 to 2003, and
developed video recognition technology to summarize sports games.
Helen’s main interests are the encoding and visualization of information
in the context of human knowledge networks. She received her BSc in
mathematics from UBC in 2002.

Philippe Chiasson
Philippe started working on the mod_perl project in 1998, writing some
Apache::* modules on CPAN and eventually started helping out with
mod_perl 1.0 and 2.0 development. In 2005, he joined the ranks of
ActiveState’s Perl Cult. He now spends a lot more time dealing with Perl
itself instead of working on high-traffic websites for TicketMaster.
Instead, he is now often busy building and debugging Perl things,
including Perl, mod_perl and all of CPAN (yes, all of it, regularly) on
a large variety of platforms. Philippe is also the current maintainer
of mod_perl 1.0.

July 2004

Stas Bekman tutorial: “mod_perl 2.0 by example”

Join Stas Bekman, co-author of O’Reilly’s “Practical mod_perl,” for a
free tutorial on getting started with mod_perl 2.0.

mod_perl integrates the power of Perl with the flexibility and
stability of the Apache Web server.

Topic: mod_perl 2.0 by example

Speaker: Stas Bekman

When: 1-5 PM, Saturday, July 10, 2004

Where: ActiveState/Sophos, 580 Granville Street, Vancouver, BC

In this tutorial, Stas Bekman will focus on the highlights of mod_perl
2.0, expanding on the the things you thought you knew from mod_perl
1.0 with lots of examples from the completely rewritten 2.0 release.

Topics will include: