FOSDEM 2011

Bonjour and Hallo Nestoria Blog readers!

This weekend, February 5th and 6th, some of our developers here are heading over to Brussels for the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, more commonly abbreviated to FOSDEM.

FOSDEM is a completely free two day conference for Open Source Developers, and we're very excited to be attending. The schedule is absolutely huge, featuring tracks such as Cloud Computing, Web Frameworks, Web Browsing, and Office; but what we're really looking forward to is the "devrooms", which include some of our favourite technologies here at Nestoria: Perl, MySQL, Virtualization, and GNU/Linux.

I am even giving a talk in the Perl devroom on Sunday at 12:50, entitled "Introduction to writing readable and maintainable Perl." I hope to get a good mix of Perl hackers and non-Perl people so I can try my hand at presenting, teaching, and a bit of Perl evangelising/marketing. I love Perl and think I'll be spending a lot of Sunday in the Perl devroom, if you're going to be there please come say hello!

 

 

Sponsoring London Perl Workshop 2010

Fellow Nestorhackers,

one of the great things about starting a company and watching it grow is that you can steer some of the resources of the company back to the people who helped. In our case, Nestoria would be unthinkable without the amazing open-source software created by the global perl community. With this in mind, I'm very proud to announce that for the fifth year in a row Nestoria will be sponsoring the London Perl Workshop. This year's event is on Saturday the 4th of December at University of London's Cavendish Campus. The theme for this year is Perl Flavours, which is an appropriate reflection of the wide variety and diversity found under the blanket term "perl", thus staying true to perl's roots of TMTOWTDI.

As at past LPWs, we will be sponsoring prizes to be awarded by audience vote at the end of the day. Specifically, prizes will be presented for

1. Best talk
2. Best topic
3. Best new CPAN module of 2010

Last year competition for the prizes was fierce. Over the five years the quality and size of the event has continually improved, which is a credit to the excellent organiser Mark Keating and all the volunteers who make it happen. Thanks also to University of London for making the facilities available. Hopefully many of the media companies in London that use perl will send speakers.

The lanyrd page for the event is up, I look forward to seeing you there.

On a related note, over the years we've had the pleasure of welcoming several interns to the wonderful world of perl here at Nestoria. If you are reading this, have basic web developer skills in another language, would like to learn perl in London, and have a few months to spare - please consider applying for one of our internship positions. As an example, this summer university student Dan joined us and as one of his projects he produced Geo::Coder::Many for the world to enjoy.

And finally, for those of you who love tech conferences, stay tuned as we'll have some more sponsorships to announce shortly. For a full list of the events and projects we support please see our developers page.

YAPC::EU 2010 in Pisa

Nestore e Nestora,

long term or technically minded readers of the Nestoria Blog might know what a YAPC is, we've been to a couple before, but for those of you who don't know YAPC stands for "Yet Another Perl Conference." For many of you I'm sure that begs the obvious question, what is Perl and why does it have so many conferences? Perl is the programming language we use here at Nestoria to make the website work; it is a wonderful language primarily designed for text manipulation, ease of use, and super speediness. Its primary use of text manipulation makes it ideally suited for website development and database usage, which is why many companies such as the BBC, Slashdot, and Nestoria use Perl.

This year YAPC was in Pisa, Italy, which is a very nice little city best known for it's leaning tower. For me it's now known as the tiniest city, the city with cheap, delicious and above all huge pizzas, and the city with the craziest thunderstorms. Day one of the conference the hotel roof started leaking due to a torrent of rain, and the unfortunate speaker had to shout to be heard over the thunder! The YAPC::EU 2010 organizers beared it all though, and did a fantastic job with the conference. Many thanks to all of them!

The conference content was outstanding, especially given that most of the speakers were volunteers who put together their talks in their free time. Whether they are talking about their own CPAN modules or somebody else's, the concepts were explained well and I really felt that I learnt a lot. Particular shout outs to Tom Doran and Florian Ragwitz who explained Dist::Zilla, Scott Chacon who talked about Git, and Tim Bunce for giving an excellent talk on software profiling. Of course it's also always great to get an opportunity to see the creator of Perl, Larry Wall give his keynote presentation.

Other than the presentations, YAPC is an excellent opportunity for socialising with other Perl geeks. I had a great time every single evening I was in Pisa - Tuesday was the pre-conf meetup, Wednesday was the conference dinner, and Thursday was the traditional monthly London Perl Mongers meetup. All of these were spent eating delicious food and chatting with interesting people until late into the night. Conversations ranged from work to Perl to C to the fact we're hiring to music to everything in between.

Overall I had a great time at YAPC::EU, and I hope I'll have the opportunity to go again next year. YAPC::EU 2011 will be in Rīga, Latvia, and hopefully we will see you there!

Nestoria Techs at LPW 2007

N3stor!ans,?? The Nestoria Tech team is four for four in talk proposals for the London Perl Workshop (LPW) 2007:

• Marc Tobias is going to talk about what we have learned in providing a public API.
• Ed will gather the kids around the campfire and tell a haunting ghost story about the perils of internationalis(z)ation.
• Spiros has chosen to share a few passages from his collection of sonnets about??A/B testing (also known as "bucket" testing in some circles).
• Mike??has to chosen??lead the audience in a song of praise for development infrastructure and discuss the joy and peril of code coverage, profiling, and benchmarking tools.

The other talks look to be of the same high standard as last year, so I encourage anyone with an interest in Perl to come along, if not just to nerd out a bit in the pub afterwards.?? A big thanks to the organizers.?? Hope to see you there.

Notes From YAPC Europe

Greetings Nestopathians,

You may have noticed a short lull in Nestoria development last week as most of the team decamped to Vienna to attend YAPC Europe 2007. For those not in the know, "The Yet Another Perl Conferences (YAPCs) are grassroots symposia on the Perl programming language coordinated by The Perl Foundation". The European event is the biggest annual Perl gathering on the continent, and this year's was the most well-attended to date with about 400 participants. The Perl community is big, growing, and very active and we're happy to be part of it both as consumers (most of Nestoria is built with Perl) and contributors (Nestoria engineers maintain several CPAN modules and have plans to add more).

Although the enthusiastic keynote presentations by Larry Wall (father of Perl) and Damian Conway (uncle of Perl?) were very inspiring, and the content of the many talks comprehensive and instructive, it was the informal chats between presentations and over coffees and beers that will really stick. There is a big ecosystem of open source tools and projects out there, and nothing beats the advice of the experienced when it comes to choosing what software to use and how best to use it. The Nestoria team left the conference full of fresh ideas and with a pile of notes to digest.

A big thanks to the YAPC Europe organizers and participants. Hope to see you next year in Copenhagen.

Speaking at AGI2007

Fellow Nestorianos,

For those of you with more than a recreational interest in geographic matters, I invite you to attend AGI2007 on the 19th-20th of September in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The annual gathering of the Association of Geographic Information, AGI2007 should be a great chance to hear from many players in a very rapidly evolving industry. My own talk will focus on some of the challenges we've faced as a start up building a service that is heavily dependent on geographic data. The entire line up looks very promising with discussions ranging from detailed case studies of interesting use of geographic information to more theoretical musings about the implications of the rapidly changing technology landscape.

Two former Nestoria interviewees Nick Black and Ed Parsons will also be speaking at the two day event.

For anyone interested in more details I refer you to the conference blog. I hope to see you there.

YAPC You There

#!/usr/bin/nestoredes,

use WebService::Nestoria::Search;

{
Just about everything that makes Nestoria go is built using the Perl programming language and related tools. Perl is a flexible and widely-used alternative to more "enterprise" platforms like Java and .NET and has a larger and better-organized collection of free libraries available than Ruby or Python. We find that it scratches our technical itches very nicely.

To stay current, most of the Nestoria Tech Team will be attending YAPC::Europe 2007 in Vienna at the end of August - the biggest yearly Perl event in Europe. We look forward to seeing a lot of friends from the London Perl Mongers and meeting other Perl users from across the continent. Larry Wall himself will be in attendance and will undoubtedly give a talk about what we can expect from Perl 6 - the as-yet-unready-for-prime-time next version of the language. If anybody wants to talk about the challenges building and scaling a vertical search engine built on Perl, Apache, MySQL, and Linux, do look us up.
}

Facebook Developers London meeting - 18:00, 24 July - John Snow pub

Dearest Nestokies!

As you will recall, a few weeks ago we launched the Facebook application to search for flats and houses in both the UK and for the Spanish market (we think we are the first non-English language applet)!

Developers have rapidly been embracing the Facebook Platform. There's been some amazing innovation. But, as is to be expected with any new system, there are lots of questions. All over the world users of the FB platform are meeting up to exchange tips and tricks, and London, where the Nestoria team is based, is no different.

Next Tuesday (24th of July) London Facebook Developers will be meeting at our favourite pub, the John Snow, in Soho at 18:00.

We're pleased to announce Nestoria will be sponsoring the event. I'm happy to buy any and everyone their first beer on one condition - you have to give us some feedback on how we can improve our application. You can recognize me by my Facebook profile picture.

If you develop for Facebook and are in London, we hope to see you there. As enthusiastic supporters of the perl community, we'd especially like to trade tips with anyone using perl to build for FB (special thanks to the authors of WWW::Facebook::API

On a final note, we very much appreciate all the positive feedback on our applets: Inside Facebook, Future of Real Estate Marketing, Tecnología Inmobiliaria, Facereviews. We'll of course continue working to improve the applets.

Sponsoring OpenStreetMap's State of the Map conference

Nestojans,

For those that don't know OpenStreetMap (OSM), it's a volunteer project to create a free editable map of the world. Obviously, mapping the entire world with volunteers like you and me isn't a trivial project. Since starting a few years ago the OSMers have gained traction, and are slowly but surely growing the coverage and richness of data they have mapped. More and more volunteers have joined the effort, both gathering data, and developing clever tools and uses for the data. Initially founded in the UK, OSM is now going strong around the world. It's a great success story of grass root effort.

 

To celebrate, and plot the way forward (pun intended), the OSMers will be meeting for their first ever State of the Map conference to be held in Manchester on 14-15 July 2007, and it's my distinct pleasure to announce that Nestoria is an official sponsor of the event. If you're interested in mapping, freedom of information, or meeting some of the people at the forefront of geo innovation this is sure to be a great conference

Related posts: the Nestoria interview with Steve Coast (founder of OSM), or the first commercial use of OSM maps.

And the winner is...

Three hacks qualified for the Quasi-Official Nestoria Hack Contest:

* Hack #24: "Where to find the best second hand clothes?" - Our good friend Leo figured out which Oxfam shops are closest to pricey property. He put that on a Yahoo Map to produce a hit list for his wife, who is seeking deals on fashionable frocks. Very clever.

* Hack #65: "Pyzeta" - Angel and Daniel from Madrid created an application for a GPS-capable Nokia mobile that allows you to browser property listings around your current position. Source code and video demo are available. Fiendish.

* Hack #68: "Locality" - Dominic created an application that shows the relative quality of local councils on a Yahoo Map. We think it uses Nestoria data to determine average husing prices for the area and factors that into its scoring algorithm. Useful >and< fun.

The envelope please…

The winners are Angel and Daniel. Congratulations, lads! We will be in touch shortly to arrange delivery of your prize – a very sweet Garmin eTrex Vista Cx GPS device. We will program in the location of the Lokku office so you can come and visit the next time you are in London.

Furthermore – thanks to Yahoo and the BBC for hosting Hack Day. Several members of the Nestoria tech team were lurking around and were very impressed, indeed.