Boston.pm is the Boston chapter of the international Perl Mongers collection of Perl user groups, founded in 1998.

The group welcomes anyone to join our mailing list and attend our meetings.

Meetings

Technical Meeting Series

Boston PM has had in-person technical meetings in the Greater Boston area for 20+ years (pre-plague).

For a calendar of up-coming meetings, see below at Schedule.

For past calendar and annals of history, see the History pages.

In the Virtual Meeting world, Boston PM participates in three sets of meetings:

• Meetings arranged and hosted by Boston.PM are in meet.Jit.si and on 2d Tuesday. See below at Schedule and BoilerPlate for details.

• Meetings arranged and hosted by Charlotte.PM are in Zoom and on Last Wednesdays. Boston.pm provides publicity and attendees for these meetings. Charlotte records these.

• Meetings hosted by Boston Linux Unix (http://blu.org) are in Jitsi and on 3d Wednesday. These are POSIX or hardware related, not Perl related. BLU records these and publishes on YouTube.

  • Bill Ricker, Boston.pm facilitator, regularly invites Boston.PM to his BLU presentations and others we think will be of interest. These tend to be POSIX as opposed to Perl, though both Bill and Federico Lucifredi tend to have some Perl in support of their projects.

(A few of our older, in-person Boston.pm meetings (2014-2015) are on YouTube mostly when we had a remote speaker via YouTube/Hangouts, but we haven’t been adding to this collection.)

Social Meetings

In normal times, Boston.pm does non-technical, social meetings. Typically this involves a restaurant or bar but could be a coffee-shop, public park, house-party, whatever.

There is no regular schedule. Typically these are negotiated among interested folks on the Discuss mailing-list.

Communications

Social Media

Boston-PM has presence on the following socials -

• MeetUp
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Fediverse/Mastodon - likely coming soon!
• Facebook Page
• FaceBook Group
• YouTube (historical only at this time)
• Perl Weekly newsletter , iCal calendar, ; and their Twitter may promote select items of ours.
  
• The Boston-area User Group Calendar “Since 1997”

The primary announcement channels are MeetUp, Twitter, and Announce mailing-list.

Mailing Lists

(Are Mailing Lists Anti-Social media?)

Boston.pm has two email lists supported by center Perl Mongers. Mailman list management has the official archives being password protected, visible only to list members. HOWEVER NOTE that both lists are logged by one or more popular archival websites that have subscribed to the lists, so these lists are effectively public.

• Announce list is moderated, intended for meeting & social announcements and cancellations and other such things. Unofficial Public Archive, 2008-present

• Discuss list is un-moderated, available for discussion of Perl-ish topics, discussions before and after meetings, etc. Unofficial Public Archive, 2002-2018 (2002-2008 there was a single list, that history is here.)

Before posting jobs to the list, please check our Job Posting Policy.

Schedule

Previous meetings’ minutes are recorded at the bottom of the latest history file.

If there’s something you can or would want to talk about, please do volunteer - in person, on the mailing list, or privately to Bill.

November 12th - 7.30 pm EDT topic start (7.00 pm 🇺🇸 gathering chatter)

We’ll discuss whatever Perl, FLOSS topics.

This is a JitSi meeting. The secure URL will be computed by this command (valid only during that week):

perl -MDigest::SHA=sha1_hex -MPOSIX=strftime -le 'print strftime "%Y/%m/%d week %U", localtime; $date=strftime "Y%Y W%U", localtime; print $date; print  "https://meet.jit.si/BostonPM-".substr(sha1_hex("BostonPM".$date),0,12);'  

(and will likely be posted here just in time, but to avoid spammers, won’t be posted on public social media)

(See Boilerplate below for additional how-to etc.)

BoilerPlate

• Meetings hosted by Boston.PM are in meet.Jit.si and on 2d Tuesday.
• Topic starts at 7:30 PM EDT; gathering from 7pm.
• Meetings hosted by Boston Linux Unix (http://blu.org) are in Jitsi and on 3d Wednesday.

(If you need to hear my rant about why Zoom’s “fixes” are inadequate, ask me off-list. Or watch my BLU Cryptology History & News annual report for the last decade.)

JITSI notes

Jitsi is a Free/Libre OSS project sponsored by 8x8 (an Atlassian spin-off). It is the freemium base for their added-value corporate meeting & VOIP platform. As FLOSS, it can be self-hosted; they provide a free demo server. We will currently be using the free demo server, but may migrate to a hosted server (where we can set defaults, privileges).

Natick FOSS group has an updated 5-page Jitsi Help .pdf file, and you can practice beforehand. (They meet 1st Thursdays, online, early afternoon - (semi)retired users.)

One can use plain web mode, but you can install the browser plug-in if you like (recommended if sharing slides or terminal). There are also iOS (iPhone/iPad) and Android Jitsi apps which work well (not for screen-share from Android). Screen-sharing may require a browser with paranoid modes off, e.g. Firefox Private Window or Chromium Temporary Profile.

JITSI keyboard shortcuts

JITSI scales fine to more people in face-sharing Brady-Bunch / Hollywood Squares mode than you can easily see at once (30ish) and if folks turn off their cameras when just listening/talking, i.e. when not commenting/presenting, it scales much higher. (If we later get more folks than will comfortably fit in Jitsi, we can set up a stream to YouTubeLive or some other platform … or upgrade to a proper panelist platform feeding a stream, but the “seminar” quality of Jitsi is fine for our level of anarchy.)

I will routinely mute those not presenting so you’ll usually need to unmute to comment. Hint: Space-bar is push to talk, M is mute/unmute (on phone/tablet it’s the skeuomorphic microphone, avoid the handset hangup button!).