I attended the London Perl Workshop today (well, the second half to be exact). Although I’m not really a Perl basher myself, the talks I attended were all fascinating.
James Gilbert from the Sanger Institute talked about how these use Perl to help compute genomes (bioinformatics). This is an area of computing I would love to know a lot more about, as my academic background is actually in Biology and Biotechnology.
They use a number of CPAN modules and other Perl stuff to produce their genome parsers and utility software. It also runs the public-facing genome browser Ensemble.
Dave Cross gave an interesting talk on best practice when connecting to databases with Perl (in other words, using DBD and not writing your own connection code!
Finally, and the main event for me, was Leo Lapworth and Leon Brocard (winners of backstage.bbc.co.uk TV-Anytime competition) talking about their backstage-winning website, MighTyV.com. These two did a superb double act and their presentation was just crisp.
I’ve been demo’ing MighTyV.com around the BBC for sometime, but they showed off some fantastic functionality of the site, including the ability to hook it up to Apple TV-capture equipment EyeTV, which I hadn’t seen before!
The event was fantastic, and I hope the organisers put one on again next year.
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