[Catalyst] London Perl Workshop 2011 (UKPW): Industrial Strength Perl (#1)

[Mark Keating]

Newsletter #1

1. Introduction
2. Theme
3. Speaker tracks/Workshop tracks
4. Sponsors

1. Introduction
It is my great pleasure to announce the launch of the website and the 
call for papers for this years London Perl Workshop (the United Kingdom 
Perl Workshop) which will be held at the University of Westminster: 
Cavendish Campus on Saturday 12th November 2011. The website can be 
found at at: http://conferences.yapceurope.org/lpw2011/. The proposal 
deadline this year will be Friday 21st October, however we advise you 
submit earlier as opposed to later 
http://conferences.yapceurope.org/lpw2011/newtalk.
The LPW is a free event but we advise you to register for the event so 
that we can gauge numbers for the related free activities (beer, coffee, 
food and cake) the registration for the conference with an existing ACT 
account is: http://conferences.yapceurope.org/lpw2011/main or sign as a 
new user at: http://conferences.yapceurope.org/lpw2011/register.

2. Theme
The theme for the London Perl Workshop will be Industrial Strength Perl, 
and will focus on the manner in which Perl is used in the commercial 
world and the strength of Perl for development in an enterprise 
environment. You can use any aspect of Perl such as Camelia, Rakudo, 
Raptor, etc. Speakers are invited to talk on any subject that relates to 
this theme, though we will also accept talks on other subjects.

3. Speaker tracks/Workshop tracks
This year, along with the three speaker tracks, we have access to two 
Workshop rooms and would like to run as many workshops as possible to 
introduce new users to the world of Perl and to refresh the skills of 
those wishing to engage with the latest developments in the Perl world. 
If you wish to submit a workshop please use the same submission form as 
the talks, please note that workshops will be 120 or 240 minutes in 
length. As always one of the rooms will have a presentation by Dave 
Cross of Magnum Solutions and this year Ian Norton has put forward a 
plan to run a Workshop/BoF entitled "Learning Perl Together".

4. Sponsors
(See the full article on 
http://mdk.per.ly/2011/07/06/london-perl-workshop-2011-sponsors/)
This year we have managed to satisfy most of our organisational 
sponsorship already, due to the generosity of the sponsors below. 
However we are always open to organisations new and old joining in and 
sponsoring the conference and helping us to achieve our aims so there is 
still a chance to join in, if you would like to be involved please 
contact Mark immediately.

antibodyMX
Evening Sponsors (Beer and Food)
Not a year goes by without Martin of antibodyMX jumping up and shouting 
that he will organise the event location for the evening beer and food 
and that his company will put in the first part of the sponsorship. This 
year is no different. antibodyMX provide a quality service which is not 
just sponsoring drinking at community events :). It wouldn't be a 
conference without them.
antibodyMX is a hosted antispam and antivirus email filtering service 
based entirely on a proven open source platform, Perl being one very 
important component. Users of the platform see a near-instant, 
near-total reduction in the amount of spam, phishing and malware content 
arriving at the mail server. We offer a free 30 day trial of the service 
to new customers. Please email info at antibodyMX.net for more information.

Booking.com
Sponsored Lecture Theatre 2, Evening Sponsors (Beer and Food)
Booking.com are synonymous with sponsoring and the Perl community, it 
seems that almost every event has them as a major sponsor and 
contributor. They are passionate about using Perl and returning value to 
the community. Once again it is a pleasure to have them with us.
Booking.com B.V., part of Priceline.com (Nasdaq:PCLN), owns and operates 
Booking.com(TM), one of the world's leading online hotel reservations 
companies by room nights sold, attracting over 30 million unique 
visitors each month via the Internet from both leisure and business 
markets worldwide.
Established in 1996, Booking.com B.V. guarantees the best prices for any 
type of property, ranging from small independent hotels to five star 
luxuries. The Booking.com website is available in 43 languages and 
offers over 135,000 hotels in 101 countries with more than 40 offices 
worldwide.

Bytemark
Marketing Sponsor, Lecture Theatre 1
During my tenure as the organiser of this event I have been able to rely 
on Bytemark for their consistent support, this year was no different in 
fact they surpassed themselves by being sponsors of the main lecture 
theatre and the marketing budget. I really have few words to thank them 
enough, and they do this without hesitation as firm supporters of a 
community.
Many of you are aware of Bytemark's standing as a quality server service 
aimed at the technical market along with the browsing populace, but you 
might not know that they are soon to provide a very new service (hosting 
platform) and you can get in (and bring Perl with you) on the ground 
level. I know these guys, if we get Perl being used on their service 
they will work with us to do fun and excellent things with it, check it 
out at: http://bigv.io/.
At Bytemark we are the UK's geek hosting outfit of choice, managing tens 
of thousands of domains, and thousands of servers, both dedicated and 
virtual. Since 2000 we've offered root access from fifteen pounds per 
month so that experts like you write their own code and have it run 
well, on a well-maintained network, without paying for more than you 
need. We can help you with sorting virtualisation, IPv6, migrating from 
virtual to dedicated and plenty of other difficult topics.

Enlightened Perl Organisation
Business Services (Organisation)
When you organise a conference that involves sponsors, the payment of 
funds and the tracking of these for the purposes of UK tax law there are 
one of two ways you can do it. You can do it as an individual but be 
prepared to pay tax on the purchases and on your new found status as 
'being paid' or you can use an organisation like the EPO who support the 
community and will handle all these details for you in a nice, timely 
and legal fashion.
Once again the EPO have stepped in to help manage the everyday proper 
handling of sponsorship and payments.
The Enlightened Perl Organisation is dedicated to the promotion of Perl 
(in particular Raptor Perl or Perl 5) as a production language that is 
suited to an enterprise environment.

Exonetric
Coffee Morning
At last year's conference the wonderful chaps at Exonetric provided us 
with a coffee, teas, soft drinks and a generous number of excellent 
cupcakes. They have leapt at the chance to do so again this year and I 
will not be alone in smiling broadly at that news.
Exonetric Consulting Ltd is a UK based specialist in FreeBSD hosting, 
offering both individual jails and managed or unmanaged systems on 
dedicated hardware. In addition we provide colocation services in our 
London datacentre and are also able to offer assistance with capacity 
planning and recommendations for best-fit software components for larger 
systems. Our FreeBSD jails provide a great value, low-cost platform for 
hosting or developing Perl services and applications.

Magnum Solutions
Dave Cross- Training Course
Like the legend of the Ravens at the tower there is Dave Cross and the 
LPW. If we have to we shall nail him to a plank of wood and call him the 
Norwegian Dave. He is almost the institution and each year he surpasses 
himself by delivering high quality training (which he is commercially 
well known and regarded for) to the conference for no cost except to 
support the community he is a leader in. Once again, thank you Dave.

Moonfruit
Evening Sponsors (Principal) (Beer and Food), Room 2 Sponsors
Joining us for the first time this year and in such a generous fashion 
are the good people at Moonfruit. They have leapt in to be a principal 
sponsor for the evenings festivities and to sponsor the whole of Room 2. 
We hope this is the start of a great relationship between the community 
and Moonfruit.
Moonfruit is a London based team of developers, designers and 
entrepreneurs who are passionate about great design, great products and 
supporting small businesses, startups and design communities.
90% of Moonfruit’s customers are small businesses who want to build 
sites, their way. They expect a higher level of design tools to help 
build better designed sites for their customers. It is the no.1 hosted 
website builder in the UK and is growing rapidly in the rest of the 
world. A third of its users are in the US. Over 3.4 million sites have 
been built using their software
The software allows users, with no previous web design experience, to 
design and build sites optimized for web and mobile. Users customize the 
style and layout of their site so that it reflects their personal brand 
without having to understand any coding, HTML or CSS providing total 
design control for everyone.
The software features unique drag and drop tools allow literal design by 
users. Website features, like forums, shopping basket or social media 
integration, can be added from internal libraries or external sources. 
Moonfruit provides a variety of packages to suit users including free, 
standard and business premium subscriptions. The Moonfruit software uses 
Perl at its core.

O’Reilly
Book Sponsorship/Lanyards
You mention Perl and O'Reilly together in one sentence and most people 
will think of a Camel. I do not. I think of the wonderful Josette and 
the fact that like Dave Cross a UK Perl event seems kind of wrong if she 
isn't there. Each year Josette carts a good number of books into London 
to provide us with tasty treats to tempt our wallets and this year we 
see new Perl books on the O'Reilly shelves with new edition (revised and 
updated) of classic texts. I cannot wait for the event now as I will get 
to see Josette again

Shadowcat Systems
Sponsors Mark Keating (Organisation), Evening Sponsorship (Beer and Food)
Without Shadowcat I would not have the time and funds to manage the 
organisational task that is the LPW, they are my constant guide to 
support, promote and aid me if anything goes awry and they love the 
community (we really do, PIMC).
Shadowcat Systems is a developer, sponsor of, and contributor to open 
source software projects including Catalyst, the elegant web framework, 
and DBIx::Class, an object-orientated database abstraction library. 
Shadowcat provides consultancy, training and support for these projects; 
systems management and automation; the design and implementation of 
network architecture; the development of proprietary and open source 
custom web applications; and offers Perl refactoring and project crisis 
management.
Shadowcat Systems are based in the United Kingdom but we deliver 
solutions to a global community of clients via onsite supervision along 
with traditional and internet based communications.

SureVOIP
Room 1 (With UK2)
SureVoip are a business focused VOIP service with a strong dedication to 
providing "Open Telecoms for Business". This is the first time they have 
sponsored the LPW directly though they were involved with us last year 
and we welcome them as they sponsor room 1 with UK2.

UK2.Net
Room 1 (with SureVoip), Training Room, Evening Sponsorship (Beer and Food)
Another new sponsor to the London Perl Workshop this year is UK2.net, 
and like Moonfruit they decided to give us a generous fund to start 
their association with our event. Sponsoring the training room, a room 
with SureVoip and contributing funds towards the evenings food and drink 
(which I believe will now match the wonderful event we had last year). 
It is great to welcome them on board for this year.
UK2.net likes Perl, our entire platform is based on it, helping us to 
service hundreds of thousands of customers enjoying some of the best 
pricing for domains, web hosting and dedicated servers out there. We've 
been one of the largest players in the industry since 1998 and we've 
just launched a new VPS service allowing you to buy resources and launch 
as many smaller VPS as you wish on our cloud. These have auto failover, 
root access, an external console and loads more goodies for just £8.95 a 
month. No need to tell you this is ideal for dev environments where you 
need to kill and redeploy your server in an instant. The platform even 
allows you to create your own virtual machine templates or choose from 
one of our instantly deployable stacks. Not bad for less than a tenner.

University of Westminster
Hosts, Sean Tohill (Organisation)
It is a complex and evolutionary time for UK Universities and one in 
which the boundaries of their operational existence must change. it is 
unfortunate that this means we have to find more sponsorship to cover 
room costs (though this was benefited by us attracting some awesome 
sponsors), however we were still given a generous discount.
Then there is Sean who has supported us for many years and gives his 
time and effort into securing appropriate dates, rooms and running as an 
interface buffer between us and the university. Again, for me Sean is a 
staple part of the LPW buffet and one that I look forward to each year. 
This year will be no different I am sure.

That is all for this inaugural newsletter, more information can be found 
on the conference website and you will be kept up to date in future 
newsletters.

Regards

-- mdk

-- 
Mark Keating BA (Hons), Writer, Photographer, Cat-Herder.
Managing Director: http://www.shadow.cat
For more that I do visit: http://www.mdk.me