Saturday was the first /Burgh?/ Meetup, a get-together of the Harrisburg Perl Mongers and Pittsburgh Perl Mongers. It went pretty well, with a variety of neat talks.

Though I don't personally think I'll end up using it, we got a good overview of Interchange. Shana pointed out that one of our friends who runs a music store might have some luck with something like that, without requiring us to write all that functionality from scratch. Hmm, maybe. Chris spoke about generating Java from Perl. While it was pretty neat, at first I didn't think I'd be able to use it. I'm lucky enought to be using Perl at work, I don't need to generate code for other languages. But then I remembered cgi::application::generator does exactly that. Though I don't currently use it, the point is that there are cases where one might even want to generate Perl code from Perl code. So, I'll be keeping an eye open for where that could be put to use :-)

I had a fun Lightning Talk on Pittsbughese, with a corresponding module that will convert one's program to Pittsburghese by simply using the module. It's called Lingua::Dialects::Pittsburghese. It's currently quite simple, but I learned about how to use Filter::Simple, which was pretty cool :-)

We had a lot of fun, and it sounds like we're all hoping to do it again. Maybe we'll even invite more folks next time. That is, maybe we can invite the guys from Philadelphia, or even the Baltimore group.

Lately, I've been quite busy with an apps rollout we're doing at work. A number of processes which used to be done by paper are being made electronic. The idea is fairly straight forward, though there's a lot of work involved. One of the neat things is that my company seems to be happy with using OpenThought to do all this. That's pretty cool :-)

It's cool for a number of reasons too. Of course, OpenThought gets use, which quickly helps to bang out bugs, helps us to see what features are missing, and the like. But OpenThought has also reached a certain level of maturity that it's actually pretty easy to use, and allows you to bang out apps pretty quickly.

The pilot release for our apps is next week, I'll get to see for myself how OpenThought really works for a large group of people.