Dave Rolsky to Lead 4 Speaking Sessions at The Perl Conference 2018

Dave Rolsky To Lead 4 Speaking Sessions At The Perl Conference 2018

The Perl Conference is taking place this summer from Sunday, June 17 through Friday, June 22. I’ll be there presenting not just one, but four different sessions. Here’s what I’ll be speaking on.

On Monday, June 18 at 2:00pm I’ll be giving a presentation titled Make Your Technical Hiring Process Suck at Least 20% Less. This is my highly opinionated take on what’s wrong with technical hiring and how it can be made better. I based this talk on my job search in early 2017 and my frustrations along the way.

On Wednesday, June 20 at 11:00am I’ll be giving a short presentation on Dist::Zilla and My Bundle. Dist::Zilla (aka dzil) is a tool for Perl module authors that prepares your module distribution for uploading to CPAN. It can do a lot of different things, including adding boilerplate documentation and tests, updating distribution metadata, tagging your release in Git, and much more. Dist::Zilla is configured by specifying and configuring individual plugins in a configuration file for your distribution.

If you want to take dzil a step further you can create your own plugin bundle. That way when you want to change how you use dzil for all your modules you can change it in one place, rather than in every distribution’s config file. I’m going to talk about what’s in my bundle and why and also give some pointers on making your own bundle.


ActiveState has been working on ActivePerl for 20 years to make it the industry’s best. Check out our distro here.

Download ActivePerl


On Thursday, June 21 I’ll be giving a one day class, Introduction to Moose. This is an interactive hands-on course all about Moose, an OO system for Perl 5 that provides a simple declarative layer of “sugar” on top of a powerful, extensible meta-model. The class alternates lecture sections with coding exercises where you use what you just learned. Please note that this class is not included in the main conference fee. There is a $165 attendance fee.

Finally, on Friday June 22 I’ll be giving another one day class, Introduction to Go. Why Go at a Perl conference? Why not? Diversifying your skills is always a good idea, and Go is a good complement to Perl. This class, like my Moose class, is highly interactive, with lots of exercises between the lecture sections. And like the Moose class, it is not included in the main conference. It costs $165 to attend.

Of course, I’m not the only speaker. There’s a huge range of great sessions and tutorials happening. So register today for The Perl Conference! I look forward to seeing you there.

Here’s some info on my Perl work, and why you might want to check out my sessions.

I am a Team Lead and Senior Software Engineer at ActiveState. I have been a Perl developer since 1999, and I’ve created or contributed to dozens of CPAN modules, including DateTime, Log::Dispatch, Params::Validate, and more. I’m a member of the Moose core development team, and in early 2009 completed a TPF grant to substantially rewrite and expand the Moose documentation. Way back when, I co-wrote Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason and RT Essentials, both published by O’Reilly. When able to catch some free time I spend it on animal advocacy, reading, playing the board game Go, and rock climbing.


ActiveState has been working on ActivePerl for 20 years to make it the industry’s best. Check out our distro here.

Download ActivePerl


Title photo courtesy of Marcos Luiz Photograph on Unsplash.

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