On Thursday we had the first London.pm tech meeting for a rather long time. But it was well worth the wait. We were at Net-A-Porter‘s very nice offices above the Westfield shopping centre. There were four interesting talks. Pete Sergeant talked about High Level Web Testing, Zefram explained the New Extensibility Features Coming in Perl 5.14, Dave Hodgkinson talked about using Perl, Hudson and Selenium together and finally James Laver introduced us to his form processing tool, Spark.

What impressed me most about the evening was the size of the turn-out. I’m told that eighty people signed up for the meeting and it seemed that most of them turned up. Perl is certainly thriving in London. In fact it seems that there are a number of companies who are struggling to find all of the Perl programmers that they need. A couple of the speakers ended with “we’re hiring” adverts.

And from a couple of conversations I had during the evening, it seems that the scarcity of good Perl in London is starting to push Perl rates up. Seems that it’s a pretty good time to be a Perl programmer in London.