YAPC::Europe 2015

Growing the Perl community - taking the challenge

(Please, follow this link to add this 'talk' to your schedule and get more info about it.)

Perl developers are hard to find.

You might think it's nice having recruiters chase you down the street waving bank notes, but think again. Many companies avoid starting a new project in Perl because it will be hard to find people to maintain it in the long term. If it stays like this, you'll have to change career (or at least your language).

In this talk we'll discuss why the community is dwindling and what we can do to reverse that trend. Each member of the panel takes 5 minutes to present themselves and their background, talk about the obstacles they see to the growth of the Perl community, and discuss any solutions they have in mind.

For the remainder of the session the panel and audience will exchange ideas and plant seeds for collaboration.

This panel has been scheduled for Thursday, 3 September 2015, at 19:00. You can access the scheduling for that day in order to see the exact location where it'll take place.

Sawyer X - Moderator

Andrew Solomon - Developer and trainer at Geekuni

As an academic in 2003 Andrew decided to use Perl to turn his dry lectures into an e-learning solution. This duty quickly became a passion and he is now a professional developer providing online Perl training through Geekuni.

Eugenia Kondryn - Recruiter at Booking.com

At one of the world's biggest Perl shops, Eugenia uses her pro-active recruitment techniques and fluency in five languages to turn software developers from around the world into Perl developers at Booking.com.

Gábor Szabó - Full-stack trainer and contract (bug) killer

Gábor has used Perl since 1995 and has been teaching it since 2000. He runs the Perl Weekly newsletter - the de-facto source of Perl-related news - and Perl Maven, the biggest Perl-blog.

Rick Deller - Head of Open Source at Eligo Recruitment

As a leading Perl recruitment specialist, Rick places candidates across the UK, EMEA and USA. He is a regular speaker and sponsor at events such as YAPC::EU, London Perl Workshop and the Perl QA Hackathon.

Upasana Shukla - Software Developer Trainee at Booking.com

Though a developer of various languages including Python, Upasana's career was launched as an intern of GNOME's Outreach Program for Women in 2013. There she was exposed to Meta Object Protocol while implementing Moose's structured exceptions. These days she works at Booking.com as a Perl developer & happily uses Perl in her daily life.

Jose Luis Martínez - CTO at CAPSiDE and AWS Trainer

Jose Luis is CTO at CAPSiDE, a company specialized in designing, deploying and managing business critical systems 24x7 (mostly in public clouds). He is an authorized AWS trainer, and is part of the small group of people to have all 5 AWS Certifications. He actively contributes to the Perl community with multiple CPAN modules and other Open Source projects (Opsview, Request Tracker) because CAPSiDE mostly develops in Perl to run its business.

Curtis "Ovid" Poe — Pragmatic Dreamer at All Around The World

Curtis, better known to many as "Ovid", has been heavily involved in using and promoting the Perl language for 15 years. He currently sits on the board of directors of the Perl Foundation and via the company All Around The World, travels across Europe and the US helping companies who need to use Perl more efficiently. -- IT consulting, training, international recruiting www.allaroundtheworld.fr

Xavier Noria — Freelance

Xavier is a member of the Rails core team, and the author of Rails Contributors. Also honored to have been presented a Ruby Hero Award in RailsConf 2010, and to be part of the team who organised the European Ruby Conference 2009.

Xavier was also into Perl for a few years, he is a CPAN author and former leader of Barcelona.pm.