Meet the European Perl Ecosystem: Spotlight on Berlin.pm

A chat with Tina Mueller (tinita), one of the most well-connected people in
Perl. Among regular conference attendees && German Perl enthusiasts, she
needs no introduction. But, for those new to the Perl scene, tinita is the
leader of Berlin.pm, Perl hacker && a great human being. Let’s get to
knowing her && her group a bit better.

Q1. Tell us about yourself && your background

I started studying computer science without ever having written a line of code, while almost every other student had already written at least their own screensaver in C.

During my studies I had a student job. My first task was to write a little perl CGI script. Since I didn’t know perl (learned Miranda and Java), I searched the Usenet for snippets and put together a lousy script. I think it was perl 5.005_04 or something. My mentor at work reviewed it and handed me “Programming Perl”. And said something like “Read it and come back in a week”. That got me addicted to Perl, and later to the community. My first YAPC was in Amsterdam 2001.

You will find me on IRC and at the perl-community.de forum, which I have been maintaining together with GwenDragon (thanks Gwen!) for a quite while now. It’s the biggest perl forum for German speaking perl hackers. And it’s written in Perl!

In my free time I like biking (although the infrastructure is far from perfect for cyclists), cooking vegan (I was lazy, recently, though), playing a bit guitar, and, of course, programming. My most important tools for programming are Vim, tmux and zsh.

And biking helps?—?it is so much better to drive on a bike on your way home from work than standing in a crowded bus/subway or sitting in a car and being part of the traffic jam. Ok, enough propaganda.

Currently I work for STRATO AG, a hosting company which supports Perl by sponsoring events and sending me to some workshops.

Q2. When && how did you start Berlin.pm? Why did you start the group?

I joined Berlin.pm in 2002, but it was already existing for a couple of months, I think. So I can’t say how it was founded.

At some point I became the group leader. But I’m not one of the most active members, actually.

Q3. How are you organized? What projects && activities do you have?

We always were doing only social meetings, but actually we had our first technical meeting in March. A member organized it at the space provided by his company. Sadly I couldn’t attend but heard it was nice.

We try to choose another Restaurant/Bar every time, so everybody can learn to know new places in our city. Traditionally newcomers may choose the place of the next meeting.

Q4. How many members are there in your group && how did you grow the local community?

I think we could say that we are eight to ten people on average at the meetings. There are people who have 100% Perl Jobs, people doing perl just as a hobby and people from the open source scene that don’t do perl at all. And it’s not always the same eight people showing up ;-)

Q5. Any events of Berlin.pm we could && should attend?

We are really just doing social meetings, regularly.

But we organized the German Perl Workshop in 2013, which was a great experience. The workshop itself, and working together with the organizing team. We had 130 attendees, and our venue was at the Betahaus, a great Co-Working Space in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Since we liked the place and the people there, Andreas K?nig and I chose it also as a venue for the Perl QA Hackathon 2015.

Q6. What are your plans for the future?

I don’t know if any of us has a plan ;-)

It would be nice to have more technical meetings, but that costs time, and some of us are already busy enough with other perl community projects.

In any case, if anyone wants to volunteer, like it happened in March, to organize something, we are of course happy about that!

Q7. Any “unsung heroes” of Berlin.pm you’d like to publicly acknowledge?

I would like to mention Andreas K?nig and Slaven Rezic.

They are doing a large part of the perl QA. If you don’t know them, you will learn to know them when you upload your first CPAN module, because they run most of the smoker tests. Upload a module, and a few minutes later you have the first reports from both. There is always a bug to find. They look into failing tests and write bug reports or pull requests. I usually do that only for the modules I actually want to use ;-)

Andreas, who is maintaining the PAUSE, has set up an analysis page which tries to compare failing test reports to each other automatically, and he is also working on letting the test scripts output more information that can be helpful for that analysis.

Slaven wrote the testers matrix, which gets you a very quick overview of failing tests by platform and perl version, which can in many cases help to narrow down the reason of the failure very fast.

Slaven is also the author of bbbike (bbbike.org). If you like to choose your cycling route depending on the number of traffic lights or the quality of the road surface, for example, check it out.

If you get reports with failing tests you cannot explain, have a look at the matrix and analysis page. You will find links for every module at metacpan.org/search.cpan.org.

Q8. Share your favorite Berlin.pm story w/ the world

Berlin has the advantage of having the Computer Games Museum, and we had our Social Event for the German Perl Workshop 2013 there. They have some original machines like Pong, for example, which we could play with. I think people liked the evening ;-)

Q9. A piece of advice for folks that want to start a PM group

Since I wasn’t a member from the beginning, I don’t know how it all got started. I guess it helps if you know which companies are using Perl in your city. Also connecting with other technical/open source meetings is probably a good idea.

Some companies might offer their space for technical meetings.

If it’s a German speaking group, you should announce it on perl-community.de and on #perlde at irc.perl.org.

Q10. What are the most important elements of a cohesive && successful group?

I guess it depends. As we are only doing social meetings we can do a meeting every month without having to care about a location and topics/speakers. If you have a website and a mailing list, and people can rely on a monthly meeting, they will come visiting.

Q11. What makes your group stand out?

I don’t know if I can answer that because I don’t actually know many other groups ;-)

One thing we have is a history of all our meetings, and Slaven Rezic put them on a map:

Q12. Anything else you’d like to add?

Anyone is welcome to join us!

And if you happen to just visit Berlin, when we don’t have our regular meeting, just write to the list if anyone wants to meet.

See you && all Berlin.pm members at YAPC::Europe 2016!