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 two 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 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.

• Boston.PM in the early years of plague also co-sponsored virtual meetings with Charlotte.PM

(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

NEWS 2025: While updating our History, resplitting it into 4 phases (Ancient, MIT from Wiki archive, MIT from Email Archive, Virtual), I noticed

• First two history two phases are recent-top reverse-chronological which was Wiki-update-friendly but history-unfriendly. That’s a deferred TBD.
• Our Social Media had listed a bunch of things underutilized and little useful.
  • ACTION — I’ve created new Mastodon, Mobilizon📅
  • NEXT: I may create a BlueSky BostonPM presence as well. We’ve been invited to join BostonOpen on Gabor’s ZulipChat server for FLOSS communities, there are Boston and Perl channels there. We can discuss whether BostonPM should be a Topic under Boston channel or a new/sub channel or what.
  • continuing: The PerlWeekly iCal calendar is importable into most personal calendars and semiautomagically includes our time now. (I’ll tweak it to point usefully instead of MeetUp.)

Best way to be informed is either sign up for one or both mailing lists boston.pm.org . But please try the new socials .

Boston-PM has presence on the following socials -

• MeetUp (raised prices and been odd lately, so we’ve be droped that.)
• LinkedIn — underutilized; FMK?
• Twitter We are not currently active on Xhitter. I’ll likely lock it down, not delete.
• Fediverse
  • Mastodon @Boston_PM@fosstodon.org
  • Mobilizon ℹ️ 📅 calendar/events
• BSKY too?
• ZulipChat Boston Open Boston (BostonOpen.dev) and Perl channels
• Facebook Page + Group — underutilized; FMK?
• YouTube (historical only at this time)
• Perl Weekly newsletter , iCal calendar, ; may promote select items of ours.
  
• The Boston-area User Group Calendar “Since 1997” (not currently showing us? TBD!)

The primary announcement channel is the Announce mailing-list (see next).

Mailing Lists

(Are Mailing Lists Anti-Social media?)

Boston.pm has two email lists supported by central Perl Mongers.
Mailman list management has the official archives being password protected, visible only to list members from the each list’s Page.
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.

• Discuss list is un-moderated, available for discussion of Perl-ish topics, discussions before and after meetings, etc. (2002-2008 there was just this as the only list.)

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.

March 11th, 2025 - 7.30 pm EDT topic start (7.00 pm 🇺🇸 gathering chatter)

We’ll discuss whatever Perl, FLOSS topics.

• TBD

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!).