This month, Jason Crome is giving a talk on using Fluentd for logging, and Perl for analytics:

Logging is one of the most important pieces you’ll have in any large-scale software system, and in a massively multiplayer game it’s even more critical. Using Ovid’s Veure MMO as an example, I’ll discuss what we are logging and why, how we use fluentd to collect information at all levels in the game’s stack, and the tools and processes we use to analyze that data.

RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup

EDIT: Slides for Logging and Analytics Using Perl and Fluentd have been posted to cromedome's Slideshare

This month, Doug Bell will be giving two short talks.

One talk is about using Travis-CI, a free continuous integration testing service, for Perl projects, and maximizing Travis's effectiveness. This talk introduces Graham Knop's Perl Travis Helpers, gets you started using Travis-CI, and shows how to configure Travis to cover edge cases like very old Perls and missing optional modules/features (using Devel::Hide).

The other talk is an introduction to Rex, a Perl-based server configuration management system. This talk was given informally at an office hours last year, but now it's a real talk with real slides! This talk introduces Rex, goes through simple configuration and tasks, and touches on some of the more powerful features of Rex such as the CMDB (Configuration Management Database).

RSVP on the Meetup

EDIT: Slides are now available for both talks on the Chicago.PM talks page:

• Introduction to Rex
• Getting the Most from Travis-CI for Perl

This month, William Lindley will be giving a talk on Imager, an image manipulation library for Perl. Easier to install than Image::Magick, Imager has grown into a rich set of tools, including some overlooked features that turn it into a robust solution.

RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup

This month, Doug Bell will give a talk on Graphite, a scalable time-series database. He'll go over a quick installation and setup, how to add your metrics using Perl, and how to display your metrics using the Grafana charting dashboard.

RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup

EDIT: Slides for Collecting Metrics with Graphite are now available on the Talks page

We've got a couple short talks scheduled for this month, and we've got a new venue, generously provided by ServerCentral.

Joel Berger is going to give a talk on testing any PSGI application with Test::Mojo, Mojolicious's excellent web testing library.

And, Doug Bell is going to give a talk on some simple websocket tricks with Mercury, a WebSocket message broker, Mojolicious and Mojo::UserAgent.

Due to the holidays, our meeting will be on December 10. RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup

(EDIT: Slides from the simple WebSocket tricks talk are now available)

This month Doug Bell will be giving a talk on Git internals, and how they effect how you use Git commands like commit, merge, pull, and rebase. The presentation will go over some common errors and explain what they mean, and how resolving them will affect the internal data of your repository.

RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup

(EDIT: See the slides for The Why of Git)

This month, Eric Johnson (kablamo) will be giving a talk exploring the Perl testing ecosystem, including how to write tests in Perl, using prove to run tests, TAP (the Test-Anything Protocol), and an exploration of CPAN test libraries including:

• Test::More
• Test::Differences
• Test::Deep
• Test::Fatal
• Test::Warnings
• Test::Lib
• Test::Cmd
• Test::DescribeMe
• Plack::Test
• Devel::Cover
• Test::Most
• Test::Modern
• Test::Pretty

Slides are available on kablamo.org

RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup page

This month, Doug Bell, Joel Berger, and Eric Johnson will be giving short demonstrations of tools to manage Perl distributions. A distribution is an installable bundle of modules, usually uploaded to CPAN for others to download.

Doug will be presenting Dist::Zilla, the 500-lb gorilla of dist management. Joel will presenting Module::Build and Module::Build::Tiny with App::ModuleBuildTiny. Finally, Eric will be presenting Minilla and Carton.

Each talk with take about 20 minutes, with some extra time for questions.

RSVP on the Chicago.PM Meetup

This month, Joel Berger will be giving a talk on testing Javascript from Mojolicious

Do you test your Javascript? All of it? Be honest. I thought so, neither did I.

It is very easy to say that testing Javascript is too hard, or that you don't need to because you have so little of it. But what if testing your client-side Javascript was as easy as testing a Mojolicious app, which is pretty darn easy? Would you do it then?

In this talk I will demonstrate Test::Mojo::Role::Phantom, which allows testing a Mojolicious app, PSGI app or even external website's client-side Javascript. It only requires the phantomjs executable, which is a piece of cake to install. You'll be testing your browser behavior in no time!

Doors open at 6:45. Meeting starts at 7:00. RSVP on the Meetup page

This month, Mike Schienle will talk about reading and writing Excel spreadsheets from Perl, with the main focus on writing them. The presentation will discuss writing both data and formulas, multiple sheets, adding comments, etc. Mike uses Excel in both his day job as an ETL geek for Northern Trust and processing weather data.

Doors open at 6:30pm. Meeting starts at 7:00pm. RSVP for Excel Spreadsheets with Perl on the Chicago.PM Meetup.

This month's office hours will be on June 11. RSVP for office hours on the Chicago.PM Meetup

(EDIT: Slides from the talk have been added to the talks page)