Agenda
On 02 November, 2006, the Israeli Perl Mongers held their regular monthly meeting. The program:
- 18:30-19:30 -- Banking Software by Yorma Shitrit
- 19:30-20:30 -- Meetings and your Stupid Boss by Doron Abram
- 20:30-22:00 -- Social Meeting
Location: F5, Habarzel 24, Ramat Hachayal, Tel-Aviv
Report
- Ran Eilam
- Yuval Levy
- Yaron Golan
- Shlomo Yona
- Dmitry Rovniagin
- Shlomi Fish
- Micha Nasriachi
- Yuval Yaari
- Eugene Ureinin
- Yoram Shitrit
- Uri Bruck
- Erez Schatz
- Pinkhas Nisanov
When we gathered, some of us discussed Moose, which is the Perl 6-like OOP system for Perl 5. We discussed how as opposed to Spiffy, it still required extracting the $self object instance, and then how to cancel this behaviour on a one-function-basis in Spiffy.
Yoram Shitrit gave an engaging presentation about how he makes use of Perl in his banking consulting company. He said Perl was very suitable for these kind of things, and its open source nature was a big advantage because he could fix things himself if there was a bug. He further claimed that his company knew how to give very good estimates for the projects they performed and that their performance fullfilled these estimates precisely.
The highlight of his presentation was a program they wrote in Perl to analyse the TTY conversations of brokers, and try to deduce what was the financial outcome of this conversation. He said they were able to do that in a high percentage of the cases.
Next on the agenda was Doron Abram's presentation about "Meeting and Your Stupid Boss". This presentation which started an active discussion and ended up a long time after the schedule, covered the issue of meetings (or "Yeshivoth") in a software company. Many things were covered, among them:
- Off-topic discussions (ski, politics etc.), and how involving they are
- Someone said that if he sees that the meeting goes nowhere he simply leaves, which started an active discussion.
- There was a discussion about hallway meetings, and how effective they were.
- There were a story about a meeting where everyone came happy with, and made a lot of good decisions, only to be later completely reverted by decisions from the parent office in the U.S.
- After another such "successful" meeting, the people who've been there realised they discussed something completely different.
- And so on.
Here is some other fallout from the meeting: "Optimizing Meetings for Fun", and "Implicit $self variable without Source Filters".
To sum up - we had a lot of fun and laughed a lot. We didn't go to a café afterwards and instead each got a ride back home.
This review was written by Shlomi Fish.