Let's organise a free teach-in

[Denny]

On Sat, 2007-02-17 at 17:29 +0000, Christopher Jones wrote: 
> On 16/02/07, Tim Sweetman <ti at lemonia.org> wrote:
> > What aspects of Perl require teaching?
> 
> References and ooPerl. 

On Sat, 2007-02-17 at 13:21 +0000, Edmund von der Burg wrote:
> I find that is what is usually lacking in mid level programmers is not
> syntax and so on but rather how to structure code so that it is easy
> to write bigger apps and maintain them.

Speaking as a middle-ish competent Perl programmer (I think), these are
the two things I'd be interested in hearing talks and advice on.  The
first one particularly, as my experience to date has covered the latter
to a reasonable extent, but I suspect the balance could just as easily
be the other way around for other people at my level.

I think someone mentioned testing too...  I attended a number of the
testing workshops and talks at YAPC and mostly just got told that
'testing is good', which is something I was already fairly convinced of.
What I'd like is some concrete guidance on how best to implement testing
on a sprawling codebase with a web front-end*, using (one or more of)
the various modules CPAN has to offer in this area.  I'm not sure if
this falls under the scope of the proposed event though, being somewhat
specific in intent/application.

Some advice on how to persuade upper management that some developer time
should be spent on testing rather than coding would be nice too.  ;)

( * I seem to recall that there was a web-specific testing workshop at
YAPC, which I missed because it ran at the same time as the longer
testing workshop which I was in - possibly I should have ducked out and
gone to the web one, in hindsight )

On Sat, 2007-02-17 at 12:04 +0000, michael wrote: 
> I'd be very happy to sit down with someone for the day and start out 
> with: This is a UNIX prompt...  and hopefully end with someone who can
> write 5 line scripts that will help them do their work, 
> and additionally someone who is plugged into the community, knows of 
> london.pm tech meets,  YAPC and the LPW.  Then we have them for life.

This is a great idea, but (imho) isn't part of this thread, which was
about making senior devs out of already competent ones.  The sub-threads
about teaching people to use CPAN probably tie in with this suggestion.

Regards,
Denny