Welcome to another year of the Mojolicious Advent Calendar! 2018 has been very good to Mojolicious and I could think of no better way to kick off this calendar than with a recap of the 2018 Nordic Perl Workshop and MojoConf held in Oslo, Norway.

Sidetrip to Western Norway

On a personal note, I especially enjoyed this trip because I was able to take a few extra days to visit the West of Norway, home to the iconic fjords. I visited Bergen and several of its Perlers before taking a fjord tour by boat and train. It would have been the perfect trip if my bag hadn't decided that it wanted to stay an extra few days in Iceland where I'd had a delayed stop-over.

Still I had an amazing times and saw once in a lifetime sights! Thanks to Christopher and Jonis and all the people whoe were my companions for the trip!

Nordic Perl Workshop and MojoConf

The Oslo Perl Mongers know how to throw Perl events! This year I actually was there twice, having been once before for the Perl Toolchain Summit.

Nordic Perl Workshop is, as its name implies, a regional workshop for Perl enthusiats to gather and talk Perl together. This year however, it was co-branded as MojoConf 2018; the previous MojoConf was also held in Oslo in 2014.

There were lots of great talks, both on Mojolicious and on Perl in general. You can see them all on the NPW Youtube Channel. For brevity, I'll just highlight a few here.

Keynote

This year's keynote was delivered by Author and Perl luminary brian d foy. He talked about how Mojo's whipupitude got real work done quickly in his consulting gigs.

Mojolicious 8.0 Announcement

Mojolicious Project founder and lead developer Sebastian Riedel presented "Eight Point Oh". Though it is ostensibly an announcement of the 8.0 release, it is more properly a recap of the features added to Mojo since 7.0. It isn't just Mojolicious either, several spin-off projects are also mentioned.

(Edit: This post originally stated that the talk included changes since 5.0. While that had originally been the planned, there were so many features added since 7.0, covering from 5.0 up was dropped.)

My Own Worst Enemy

On another personal note, I love including working code and doing live demos in talks. I know the former risks bordom but I fell it is important for people to be able to see how code really works in practice. Because of that fear, I like live demos because it engages the audience and makes code-heavy talks more physical.

Of course everyone knows the problems of live demos! Fear that they might fail in all kinds of embarrasing ways must surely be why more people don't attempt them. Well this time I hit the most embarrassing of them all.

I realize the problems inherent with live demos and so I do what I can to prevent them: I practice, over and over. This time, gentle reader, I learned a new lesson:

Practicing your live demo includes practicing logging in. Joel Berger, today

That's right, I forgot the login credentials to my own demo.

That said, most of the talk still worked. So beyond that first lesson, here's one more: even experienced speakers mess up, we shrug and move on. Don't let fear of failure stop you from speaking to groups of like minded colleagues about the work you do.

The talk is about migrating from a Lite app to a full app. If you find yourself feeling afraid or confused in moving to a full app, or if you read the Mojolicious documentation and wonder how it applies to a full app, give this a watch. Bonus material about modern Javascript at the end too.

And Now, a Bit of Fun

Right before the lightning talks, call it an hour before, conference co-organizer Marcus Ramberg mentioned that he wished there was at least one more lightning talk to fill out the time. I had had one more talk idea and even had a vague outline of structure in my head, so on the spur of the moment I told him I'd do it. The result was a bit rough (of course), and I've since cleaned it up if I should get a chance to do it again, but it was still fun I think. If you're in the mood and have 5 minutes, what my rant about SAML.

Finally

Have some fun, watch the talks from the conference, and if you enjoy what you see, consider coming to the next MojoConf! I want to thank all of the organizers, the venue Teknologihuset and the conference partner/sponsor KSAT. I had a great time and I can't wait for the next one!