The Perl and Raku Conference 2024 in Las Vegas

More Regular Expression Voodoo.In the previous conferences, we looked at solving Sudokus and
the N-Queens problem with regular expressions.

In this talk, we take what we have learned the past years, and
apply our learnings to solve different puzzles.

Star Battles, Binaries and Suguru will be among the puzzles we'll
be solving using regular expressions.Audience: All["Perl", "Fun", "Regular Expressions"]

All games are not created equal. In some games the house edge should rightly keep you from even trying. But which games come close to a level playing field? If you are going to play, at least have a fighting chance.An overview of casino gaming.

Learn how to play several casino games.
Learn how to play smartly to avoid some really bad math.
What kind of house advantage is built in against you?
How much "homework" must you do to get ready?
Which games are entirely luck, and where can you maybe gain an edge?Audience: All["Fun"]

I'll be talking about hiring, training, mentoring and growing people to become (Perl) developers in an environment that's remote first, or hybrid. This talk is aimed at anyone who makes hiring decisions, leads or manages developer teams, or who mentors people at work or in an open source setting.It's been exceedingly difficult for many businesses to recruit new Perl developers. We all know this. It's getting harder. People retire or move on to different languages as the market evolves. But lots of businesses still luckily rely on Perl, and there is an appetite for more developers. Sadly, not many new ones are organically popping up. So we need to help.

In this talk, I will condense what I've learned in my 15+ years of experience hiring, training and retaining junior Perl developers. The market and the work environment has changed, and we're mostly all working remote now. This brings unique challenges and opportunities for hiring, training and mentoring, as well as working as a developer or a manager of developers in general.

We're going to look at how to attract, screen, interview and hire talented, motivated young people, how to get them interested in Perl, and how to mentor and train them up to be not just junior developers, but ultimately strong, independent thinkers and valuable contributors to your team, and sometimes the Perl community as well.

While my experience is based on the German and UK market, there are a lot of strengths in both education systems that can be utilised in the US market as well. Audience: All["Perl", "Community", "Beginner Talk"]

A discussion of some do's and don'ts while trying to balance community building and code quality in a distributed open source product using the MoSCoW prioritization technique as a framework for QA.When performing QA on code submissions in an open source project, you may be interacting with new members to the community, and people you have never met. While maintaining the guidelines of the community and ensuring code quality are top concerns, a nod must be given to building and uplifting the community, even when failing QA. The MoSCoW method for prioritization, often used in project planning, provides a good framework for giving the necessary feedback, making clear what is required, and giving space for opinion.Audience: All["perl", "QA", "Koha", "Community"]

Your project's README stinks. Let's make it better, together!Your project's README on Github is your project's landing page, your one chance to land a solid first impression with a new user. So why are so many READMEs so boring? With minimal effort, you can make a lasting impression that win over users who might otherwise move on to another project instead.

Jason Crome will show you some techniques for making an eye-popping README for your project, using Request Tracker, Dancer, and other popular projects as models for what can be done. By the end of this short talk, you'll be able to take your project's README to the next level and set yourself apart from other open source projects.Audience: All["Perl", "Raku", "Open Source", "Community"]

Want to extend Perl with libraries written in other languages? Interested in adding a secure plugin system to your Perl app? Want to stay away from building and linking native extensions? This talk will cover extending Perl with Extism, a lightweight framework for building with WebAssembly.Traditionally, Perl is extended with libraries written in other languages using the C ABI and linking via an XS extension or FFI. Building and linking a native library or extension into Perl can be error prone and even introduce memory safety issues into a Perl program. Building to WebAssembly (Wasm) enables running code from a multitude of programming languages without building, running, and linking them as native code. How can we easily integrate running Wasm with Perl to allow extending Perl without perils of linking native code?

In this talk, I’ll start by providing basic background information on extending Perl and discussing why you might want to use Wasm instead of linking native extensions. Then, I’ll contrast the development workflow using Wasm both directly and with the [Extism](https://extism.org/) framework. Finally, I’ll showcase how Extism can be used to implement a sandboxed plugin system in your Perl app that supports a multitude of programming languages.Audience: All["Perl", "Open Source", "Native"]

How do you create music with perl, from scratch? Drop-in to find out how, with details, examples, and audio too, of course! This will be a short presentation, given the wide scope of the topic. I will cover the basic concepts of algorithmic music, introduce available CPAN modules, show how to use a few, including when and why to use them. Audience: All["Perl", "Algorithmic", "MIDI", "Music", "Beginner Talk"]

Phrasing and voicing techniques with example algorithms and audio! Also: How to interactivly respond to events with MIDI!
This presentation will introduce fundamental phrasing and voicing techniques, and "real time MIDI" too. Which modules to use will be discussed, of course.
Audience: Intermediate ["Perl", "Open Source", "Fun", "Music", "Intermediate", "MIDI"]

Did you know that Perl has 5 new AI projects?

- OpenAI ChatGPT
- TensorFlow Neural Networks
- Cowl Ontologies
- PerlGPT Large Language Models
- ChatGPU Navi™ AI

Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the future of Perl... don't miss it! Future-proof your career with Perl AI.In this talk, we'll review the current status of all major AI projects in Perl.

We will also attempt to answer a number of frequently asked questions, such as:

- Do I have to pay to use ChatGPT in Perl?
- What is a neural network?
- What is an ontology?
- Can AI write Perl source code?
- Can we create strong AI in Perl?

Artificial intelligence is the way of the future, and is Perl's big chance to make a comeback.

Let's make the most of this AI opportunity to join together and put Perl back on top!Audience: All["perl", "ai", "artificialintelligence", "aiperlcommittee", "ml", "machinelearning", "fun", "community", "future", "Perl", "Open Source", "Fun", "Community"]

exercism.org is an online open-source platform for people to complete syllabuses, exercises, and receive mentoring in a variety of different programming languages. In my talk I will describe the development of the Perl and Raku tracks and how I hope to encourage more people to learn these languages.This talk will go in detail about how Perl and Raku have been integrated on exercism.org. I will describe how exercises have been implemented for our languages, how the in-browser editor runs Perl and Raku tests, the current state of the work-in-progress syllabuses for these languages, and how I try to gently introduce people coming from other programming languages into Perl and Raku.Audience: Beginner["Raku", "Perl", "Open Source", "Fun", "Polyglot", "Community"]