Look Who’s Back#
Earlier this year I was excited (one might even say well chuffed) when I heard that the London Perl Workshop was coming back after a hiatus of several years. I knew that in all likelihood I would not be able to attend, but it has been a bucket list item of mine for quite some time. You may be thinking to yourself that I have a weird bucket list. You’re not wrong.
I made no plans to attend, since I would be using my professional development days to attend The Perl Toolchain Summit. I thought I might make a short trip with my remaining budget to a conference in NYC or Chicago, since those destinations are easy to get to from Toronto.
Fast forward to October. The US conferences which had I found were fairly expensive. I wouldn’t be able to fit a conference pass, airfare and hotel with my remaining (or even entire) budget. I optimistically crunched some numbers around attending the London Perl Workshop.
To my surprise, I could make the travel and hotel costs work within my budget as long as I didn’t stay any longer than from Friday to Monday. Since the workshop is free, I didn’t have to worry about splashing out USD 600 for a day at a conference. I casually floated to the MetaCPAN crowd that I was thinking of a long weekend in London. Leo decided to come down as well so that we could hack on MetaCPAN in the time around the workshop. Mickey had already planned to come. Mohawk, who hangs around in our IRC channel, would be there as well. So I already knew I’d be in good company.
My manager signed off on the trip and my family decided I wasn’t so important that they couldn’t do without me for a few days. I was off to London. I would not be missed.
Wheels Down London#
I flew out late on Thursday night, arriving early Friday morning. I dropped my bags at the hotel, planning to check in after lunch. I found a really nice little coffee shop and then walked over to Denmark Street. That took about an hour. Mickey had said there were some cool guitar shops there. I wasn’t too excited about looking at gear I couldn’t afford, but it did sound interesting. It’s a very short street and I saw Mickey and Sawyer on the sidewalk within a few minutes of arriving there.
Mickey took me into a couple of guitar shops. In the first shop that we visited Richard Ayoade popped in to look at a guitar. We all played it cool and didn’t bother him, but bumping into someone from The IT Crowd so shortly after my arrival did bode well. Actually, based on the length of my trip, Travel Man was also a good fit.
Next we ran into Leo on the street and we collectively decided to head for lunch. The result was most excellent. At this point I was well gruntled as the locals may or probably may not say.
We did a bit of walking and then stopped for cake and coffee. Then we did a little more walking and some shoppinng. Eventually we headed down to the pre-workshop social. We immediately saw some familiar faces. It was great to reconnect with people.
The Pre-Workshop Social#
I had been feeling somewhat proud of myself for flying in to London just for the weekend – and all the way from Canada. Surely that was impressive or something? All of that became largely moot when Kenichi Ishigaki walked into the venue, having arrived from Japan this same day. I hung my head in shame, knowing I had been bested. He also was returning home on Monday like I was. Very impressive stuff on his part. My trip was mere child’s play in comparison.
At some point the venue got incredibly loud. I felt like I was losing my voice. Leo, Sawyer, Mickey and I set out to find some dinner. That was also more than sufficient. Eventually we got back to the hotel. It was maybe 11 pm. In all of the excitement I didn’t get a chance to take a nap or even change out of my overnight airplane clothes. I was ready for a solid night of sleep.
The Workshop#
On Saturday morning, Leo and I headed down to the conference on foot, since our hotel was quite close to the venu. We grabbed a coffee on the way and then did the registration, which consisted of putting your name on a name tag and getting your conference scarf. Providing a scarf as swag means the organizers don’t have to take sizes or different styles into account. Very smart.
Here I had the chance to (re)connect with even more people, since just a small fraction of the attendees had been at the Friday evening social. The event was incredibly well attended. The vibe was positive, with lots of laughs and lots of interesting talks.
I attended Dave Cross’ talk first and we got to have a quick chat. I had missed connecting with him in Toronto in 2023, so this was the first time we had met in person. I have been pestering him online for a while now, so it was nice to meet face to face. I also made it a point to reserve Mohammad for lunch before he got scooped up by someone else, since I really didn’t have a good chance to speak with him in Toronto either. That turned out to be a good plan, as he was unable to attend the evening social. He also gave me a lovely gift to welcome me to London. What an incredibly kind person. I should be giving him gifts to thank him for all he has done to amplify my blog posts in the Perl Weekly.
Lunch was Mohammad, Paul Cochrane, Mickey, Sawyer and I. Sawyer gave a technical presentation on my laptop as we waited for the food to arrive. I learned a bunch. It was nice to have Paul along since I have also been pestering him online for a while. He doesn’t seem to mind. 🤞
I had a chance to meet Stuart MacIntosh (president of The Perl and Raku Foundation) in person. I have been working with Stuart and TPRF on sponsorship and fundraising for the last 6 months. After many video calls we could finally chat in person. I also was able to corner Mark Fowler, who worked on a team with me for many years but sadly now works at CircleCI. That’s sad for me (not for him or CircleCI). Mark is the creator of The Perl Advent Calendar. This is the 25th year of the calendar. I doubt he had that kind of longevity in mind when he was inspired over drinks to get this project out to the world.
The afternoon talks were also interesting. I won’t go through an inventory. Likewise, I won’t name every single person I met – but I probably could.
I should add that I found Theo’s lightning talk tribute to Abe, whom we lost just a short while ago, to be quite moving.
After the event many of us went out for social drinks, which was nice. Julien Fiegehenn sat with us at the pub. I guess I am still name dropping. 🤔
Leo, Mickey, Sawyer and I went out to find some dinner. As we were about to order our food, it became clear to me that I was starting to reach my limits, so I left them to order their curries without me and headed back to the hotel to sleep. I was trying to be thoughtful by leaving before food was ordered, lest something go to waste. Apparently in my absence the 3 of them ate a meal meant for at least 4 people. Kudos to them and their hardy (hearty?) appetites.
Thoughts on the Conference#
Before I get into stories about hacking, I’d like to share some thoughts on the conference itself.
It was really well organized. Thanks to Lee and Julien and everyone who helped organize and volunteer on the day.
There was a great mix of people. There were:
- Older people
- Younger people
- Working people
- Retired people
- A large number of attendees who had never been to this workshop before
- A number of attendees who had never been to a Perl workshop before
As I looked around the room, I saw people who were there to reconnect with old friends, people who were looking to make new friends and a collective of quirky, off-beat, nice people who came together out of a shared enthusiasm for arcane knowledge and niche programming languages. It’s a place where everyone can feel welcome and where you can give a talk about scratching some weird itch while your peers listen silently to your every word.
I hope this conference happens again soon. It was a real pleasure to attend.
A Miniature meta::hack#
Sunday morning began with finding coffee and then hacking in the hotel lobby with Leo, Mickey and Sawyer. Before I headed to London, Julien had asked me if I had a location for hacking. I said “maybe in one of our rooms?” He reminded me that this is London and I was just a naive child. He was right, of course. I could barely walk around my bed. If I flipped down my tiny table, I couldn’t even do that. Luckily the lobby cleared out after breakfast. After that we had access to long tables, lots of electrical sockets, water, coffee and snacks.
I began the day by working on our AWS-hosted Elasticsearch instance. Elastic kindly sponsored us with a cloud instance earlier this year when I reached out to them, but we hadn’t been able to fully take advantage of it. It set out to work on getting the cloud instance basically up to date with production data and working with Mickey on his Docker setup, which has been affected by a kind of “move fast and break things” by people who are not named Mickey. That all worked out well.
Later in the morning, Julien stopped in to hack with us. We all stepped out for lunch and then Mickey and Sawyer headed off to the airport. Julien took me and Leo on a sightseeing tour and then we headed back to the hotel for more hacking. After lots of screen time, we found a really nice Chinese restaurant. After eating, Julien headed home and Leo and I got back to hacking. I probably could have gone to bed, but I had left something in a broken state and it was going to eat away at me if I didn’t deal with it before bedtime. That worked out well and I was able to sleep like a baby.
Hack Day, The Last#
I got up at 6 AM on Monday to go for a run. I started off moving towards the external setting for “Slough House” as it appears in my beloved Slow Horses. I then looked for more interesting places to explore. I love seeing a city on foot this way. I can cover a lot of ground and I’m also getting my workout. An added bonus is that I have a Strava map of the run as a kind of souvenir after the trip. I have fond memories of running in Oslo, Paris and Lyon at the various Toolchain Summits. If I’m going to be doing that much sitting, I owe it to myself to spend some time where I am definitely not sitting.
Upon my return, Leo treated me to a bacon and egg sandwich with ketchup. I’m not going to lie – it was delicious. As we ate in this tiny shop we were able to watch the regulars come by and order “the usual”. I wish I had a place like this close to me. My lack of a cozy sandwich shop near my own home is likely better for my cholesterol, but YOLO.
After breakfast we did some more, you guessed it, hacking. Over sandwiches Leo got me to realize that my plan to test a staging environment with the cloud Elasticsearch was fine, but what was I hoping to learn? I explained to him exactly what I was hoping to learn and it’s fair to say, I was not going to learn much. So, I deployed the cloud Elasticsearch to the production. We could toggle back to the bare metal Elasticsearch if this turned out to be a mistake.
To my surprise, the cutover was so painless that I’m not sure anyone noticed. The hosted Elasticsearch had data that was at least a day behind production. I re-ran the indexer on all releases in the previous 48 hours. Now we were basically caught up. (There did turn out to be an issue with a couple of indices which are not related to search – Graham sorted these out on the following day).
I don’t have any benchmarks to prove it, but the site now feels faster to me. I had been worried about the lag between the data centres when going to a remote Elasticsearch, but it’s quite possible that the powerful system running the new Elasticsearch is more than making up for any increased latency. For the time being we have front end containers running in Frankfurt. They talk to back end bare metal servers in the UK. The bare metal back ends speak to the hosted Elasticsearch in Frankfurt. Eventually everything should reside in Frankfurt, but that’s a conversation for another day.
Aside from no longer needing to worry about keeping 3 Elasticsearch nodes up and running on bare metal, we are now in a position to upgrade from Elasticsearch 2.4 to 5. Then we’ll move to 6 and so on. Being able to migrate from one cloud instance to another will be far easier than trying to allocate enough hardware to run two concurrent versions of Elasticsearch during an upgrade. I would never point to the cloud as a solution for everything, but in this case the benefits have become very clear to me. I would like to thank Elastic for their commitment to The Perl Community. They have been incredibly helpful.
This Elasticsearch cutover was the conclusion of work which began 6 months ago at the Perl Toolchain Summit in Lisbon. Emotionally it feels really good. The bulk of the work happened in bursts, generally when some of us were in the same room or just around the time. I think remote work is amazing and I would strongly advocate for 100% remote work, but there is still real value in face to face meetings. I’m glad we were able to make this happen.
After going live to production and not seeing anything go up (down?) in flames, Leo and I headed to Paddington Station. He took his train home and I filled any remaining gaps in my luggage with junk food for the kids. I’m not sure if that makes me a good or a terrible Dad, but a precedent has been set by past trips and at this point I’m not sure I’m in a position to break with it.
As I sit in my Air Canada flight, somewhere over Newfoundland, I now look forward to seeing some smiling faces at home and hopefully being attacked by a completely out-of-her-mind 75 pound dog. And I’m already thinking about how I can once again make it across the Atlantic to get some work done.