Testing Across the Language Barrier with FFI::Platypus

(From 10:00 to 10:25 in COLESVILLE room)

Perl has an excellent testing culture, testing tools and testing libraries. Perl also has an effective Foreign Function Interface (FFI) called FFI::Platypus that allows developers to call into dynamic libraries directly without having to write XS. In this talk I will show you how to use these highly effective ingredients to test across the language barrier in projects that mix-and-match Perl and compiled code. I will use as an example how we used this technique at Fastly to call Varnish Configuration Language (VCL) in unit tests.

~ Graham Ollis

Senior Software Engineer at Fastly

Introduction + Debugging Your Brain

(From 9:30 to 9:55 in FENTON room)

Welcome to the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop, 2019 Edition!

Your brain is a complex system. Learn to debug it using this frontal cortex feedback loop to become a more effective team member, friend, and human. Reframe frustration into accomplishment, catch “maladaptive thought patterns” before they get to you, and short-circuit “downward spirals”. Resources at https://caseywatts.com/mindmanipulation!

~ DCBPW Organizers + Casey Watts

"Casey Watts!" never leaves home without bubbles. His super-power is empathy and helping others become more empathetic. He has a background both in psychology and in software development, making him well prepared to discuss psychology with developers. He studied neurobiology at Yale University, and he co-published a few neurobiology papers.

Fun Evolutionary Computation and Image Classification Research Results

(From 14:00 to 14:25 in COLESVILLE room)

This talk gives an overview of three papers: "The Surprising Creativity of Digital Evolution", "Universal Adversarial Perturbations", and "Adversarial Patch."

~ Dan Cardy

Dan is a Software Engineer who loves the sometimes-quirky results of recent computer science research.

Practical Perl 6 Regular Expressions

(From 10:00 to 10:25 in COLESVILLE room)

This talk covers the basics of Perl 6 regular expressions by going through a number of real world examples. We cover some gotchas for those coming from Perl 5, as well as some little gems that make hard things easy. We will make use of basic syntax, the match variable, interpolation, character classes, predefined rules, and other goodies.

~ Brian Duggan

Likes coding, math, and short fiction. His favorite color is blue.

Perl Evangelism through Civic Hacking

(From 16:30 to 16:55 in COLESVILLE room)

Less technical and more activism; this soap-box session is largely about talking folk into devoting some volunteer time solving local problems while spreading awareness of and love for perl as a tool for change.

~ J.E. Turcotte

Long time member of DC.PM and CodeForNoVA both, a perl user for 20 years, self-taught and rusty due to management duties, Joshua seeks to reinvigorate both the perl and activism communities. Writes sci-fi and fantasy occasionally and has recorded far too many #letsplay videos for youtube (because why be productive?) Planning to take over the world, fix it, then disappear in a puff of nanotech smoke.

Getting started with GIMP

(From 16:00 to 16:25 in COLESVILLE room)

GIMP is a freely distributed program for image creation and manipulation. There is so much that can be done with GIMP I'm just going to touch on how to use some of the tools to do a few common things. After this discussion you will know how awesome and easy it is to do seemingly complicated image tasks with GIMP.

~ Dawn Wallis

Working as a contractor for the government, I am a Medical Research Programmer and Web Developer, making web forms for clinical staff and capturing and converting medical images so they can be displayed and evaluated. I enjoy collecting and sanitizing data, image manipulation and automation. In my spare time, I'm family-centric, but I also like to volunteer to organize events like DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop and The Perl Conference.

SocketsSurveyor – Enhancing Visibility of Your Internal Cyberspace

(From 11:00 to 11:55 in COLESVILLE room)

Using perl to track and analyze network activity, and perform device behavior analysis.

~ Mark Mollenkopf

I am a perl advocate, hobbyist programmer and in my current day job, I work in the US Army as a Cyber Operations Technician, currently assigned at USCYBERCOM

Adventures in Dunderland: The Python Data Model for Perl Mongers

(From 13:00 to 13:55 in COLESVILLE room)

Python is designed to be easy to learn for beginners, and easy to pick up for experienced programmers. But Python's simplicity means you might not be using all the features the language has to offer. This is especially true if the features don't exist in your favorite programming language. In this talk I'll review the Python data model, which is the key to writing idiomatic Python code. You'll learn how to emulate the behavior of Python's internal types such as sequences and dictionaries using Python's special double-underscore ("dunder") methods.

~ Walt Mankowski

Walt Mankowski is a senior software engineer at Syapse, where he helps healthcare providers bring precision medicine to cancer patients. Walt's a recovering ivory tower computer scientist who enjoys pointing out things that Perl does better than Python to his coworkers. He enjoys Perl, regular expressions, high-performance computing, and Futurama.

A look at FaaS for Perl

(From 11:00 to 11:25 in COLESVILLE room)

FaaS (Functions-as-a-Service) solutions allow you to create and deploy modular functions that can scale independently. In this session, we will take a look at the options currently available for Perl. This will specifically target AWS Lambda Layers and OpenFaaS with examples showing how to create a runtime environment and function in each.

~ Daniel Heffner

Senior Engineer at 3M HIS, working with Perl for the past 11+ years.

Where am I now, Really? A novel use of decompilation‎

(From 11:30 to 11:55 in COLESVILLE room)

Perl was created by a language enthusiast, so it is only fitting to finish the circle and show how computer-to-human translation is like human-to-human translation. More so that I think most people have hitherto appreciated.

Decompiling is often used in conjunction with recovering lost source code, or reverse-engineering code when we do not have access to the source code. It can be optionally used in Data::Printer for code references you have stashed in your data structures.

I will describe a novel use: in tracebacks, debuggers, and similar places where accurate position reporting is desired, even in the presence of string evaluation where the source code was created at runtime.

I'll show how line numbers are vague and ambiguous.

The module B::Deparse has been around a long time for Perl. I have extended that in B::DeparseTree so that it can be used at runtime to show you where you are. I will also demo its use in a real debugger, and promised to include a reference to at least one of the great virtues of programmer espoused by Larry Wall.

~ Rocky Bernstein

I am a long-time CPAN contributor, and open-source developer more generally.

Among the many different kinds of programs I have written are debuggers for 8 or so programming languages, including Perl, bash and GNU make.

I have worked at IBM Research, as a government contractor for NASA/Goddard (in climate studies), the Associated Press, a large financial institution, a university, and way too many startups.

I currently work in the Ethereum cryptocurrency space at ConsenSys.