Meet the European Perl Ecosystem: spotlight on AmsterdamX.pm

A chat with Upasana && Sawyer, two of the most well-connected people in Perl. Among regular conference attendees && Dutch Perl enthusiasts, they need no introduction. But, for those new to the Perl scene, Upasana && Sawyer are the leaders of AmsterdamX.pm, they both work at Booking.com && are good friends of ours. Let’s get to knowing them && their group a bit better.

Q1. Tell us about yourselves && your background

Upasana: I am an Indian. I came to Amsterdam around 2 years ago for working at Booking.com. I did my graduation in electronics. My first encounter with programming was in the final year of my graduation, around 6 years ago. As part of my curriculum, I had to study 8085 assembly language. Though 8085 was/is quite obsolete, but I enjoyed learning it. It made me realize that programming is probably the only thing which I can do for the rest of my life without getting bored :). As a result of the encounter with 8085, I decided to pursue my masters in informatics (which is combination of electronics, mathematics, physics & computer science). During my masters, I learnt quite a few languages, but I have forgotten most of them now. Perl is probably the only language which I have not forgotten yet & will probably never be able to forget. I use it almost daily. It brought me to my current employer & my current location.

Sawyer: The short version is: I studied computers in high school. I studied Pascal, Assembly, and C. I learned Perl during my off hours at my first major job. I mostly worked as a GNU/Linux sysadmin and Perl developer. In 2013 I moved to work at Booking.com where I work now as a Senior Developer. I go to a lot of conferences, I give a lot of talks, I maintain several Perl projects, and recently I’ve become the new Pumpking for Perl 5.

Q2. When && how did you start AmsterdamX.pm? Why did you start the group?

Sawyer: I started the group shortly after moving to Amsterdam. Upasana didn’t arrive yet. There is a long-standing Dutch Perl Mongers called Amsterdam.pm. Their meetings are in Dutch. While the group is hospitable, my Dutch was non-existent. Having run TelAviv.pm for a while, I decided to start a new group in Amsterdam. We called it AmsterdamX.pm, since it optimizes for expats by conducting the talks completely in English. The location and time are also different.

Our first meeting was held on July 22nd, 2013.

Maintaining a group is not easy and when Upasana joined Booking.com and moved to Amsterdam, she wanted to get involved. She offered help for some small tasks, but soon enough she became a co-organizer. :)

Nowadays the Amsterdam.pm and AmsterdamX.pm groups both share members, under one nice Dutch umbrella.

Q3. How are you organized? What projects && activities do you have?

Upasana: We generally try to have our meetings on the last Monday of the month, but it doesn’t always work. We have guest speakers who can only make certain days or different scheduling conflicts, or sometimes organizers are on vacations.

Sawyer: We held a hackathon once, which was successful. We would like to organize another sometime.

Upasana: When we don’t have enough talks, we send a CFS (Call for Speakers) to both the Amsterdam groups’ mailing lists and to internal Booking.com mailing list (since many Perl developers work here), we set up a room at the office, organize food (usually), and record the talks (also usually). We’re now uploading more and more talks and we’re continuing the editing work to get them uploaded.

Q4. How many members are there in your group && how did you grow the local community?

Sawyer: I don’t know what the size of the mailing list is. It’s not very active, but we do get between 20–70 people at a meeting. It depends on the day, the speakers, the topics, and how much we publicize the meeting.

Upasana: We accept talks on many topics, even non-Perl. We had talks about C++, Rust, Go, Erlang, and general technologies.

Sawyer: I think the meetings helped people come out of the shell and the attendance of the Dutch Perl Workshop increased.

Q5. Any events of AmsterdamX.pm we could && should attend?

Sawyer: Meetings, basically.

Q6. What are your plans for the future?

Sawyer: We want to organize another hackathon, because hackathons are fun, but there are no solid plans at the moment. We intend to upload all the videos that we have and to improve the quality of the recordings.

Q7. Any “unsung heroes” of AmsterdamX.pm you’d like to publicly acknowledge?

Sawyer: Upasana.

Upasana: No…

(There was some back and forth of “yes” and “no” here.)

Upasana: Wendy and Liz.

Sawyer: Nick Perez helped set up the group, organize the first meeting, and gave a great talk there.

Upasana: Maxim Vuets, this person brought two first time speakers \o/.

Sawyer: Steffen Mueller, as usual. Peter Rabbitson (Ribasushi) used to travel 4 hours at a time from Germany to make it to the meeting!

Upasana: When we’re out of talks, Stevan Little comes in and gives an interesting talk. He also helps other speakers (e.g. Upasana) with their talks :).

Sawyer: “Interesting talk”. Oh, and a shout-out to Sebastian to whom we owe our hackathon! And to Theo who is always incredibly helpful and a great organizer.

Q8. Share your favorite AmsterdamX.pm story w/ the world

Sawyer: Maybe the time that Ingy döt Net (who lives in the USA) showed up out of nowhere, went on stage and said “My name is Ribasushi, and I would like to talk about…. err…. “ and gave a talk for an entire hour.

Upasana: Very good talk!

Sawyer: Stevan submitting a talk with no title because he had no idea what to talk about. I had to come up with some title and description so, basically, I called it “Big world, Little Stevan” [1]. Karen Pauley (president of The Perl Foundation) gave a talk about TPF. Philippe Bruhat (BooK) giving a talk in which people laughed so loud that it was very hard to edit the video.

Q9. A piece of advice for folks that want to start a PM group

Sawyer: Find a spot. Reach out to people. Look for interesting and fun things. Challenging is good, fun is better, funny is best. Advertise over and over and over again.

Upasana: Apart from what Sawyer said, if you want to organize meetings, but can’t put much time/effort (sometimes, it’s a lot of work), then ask for volunteers. Ask Amalia for more advice. ;) Best organizer I have ever seen. B-)

Q10. What are the most important elements of a cohesive && successful group?

Upasana: Do not limit your topics. Open the stage for anything. Socialize.

Sawyer: Remember it’s just an excuse to get together with friends.

Upasana: Push people and motivate them to give talks! Especially first time speakers.

Q11. Anything else you’d like to add?

Upasana: Thank you for doing this & for everything else you have been doing for the Perl community. Keep rocking :)

Sawyer: Yes. That! :)

[1] http://amsterdamx.pm.org/events.html: January 20th, 2015.

See you && all AmsterdamX.pm members at YAPC::Euope 2016!