Saturday morning in Vienna. We were intending a 10K — a good way to shake off four days of sitting in a room staring at manifests. We took a wrong turn somewhere around the Prater, failed to correct it, and finished 14K instead. Nobody was angry about it. The extra kilometres took us through streets we wouldn’t have found otherwise, past the football stadium and through a neighbourhood we had no particular reason to be in. Finishing tired is still finishing.
This is the 16th Perl Toolchain Summit. That number is remarkable in a way that’s easy to walk past — the Perl community has been gathering a small, focused group of toolchain maintainers in a room every single year since 2008, and the output has been disproportionate to the headcount. The Oslo Consensus in 2008 established how the CPAN toolchain would evolve. Lancaster in 2013 did the same for distribution metadata. Last year in Leipzig, the group shipped Test::CVE, prototyped MFA for PAUSE, cut Perl core runtime by 13%, and kept the next-generation CPAN client work moving forward.