• 2012.06.27 in #49 Yet Another YAPC::NA Report
  Report by David Mertens - known for his work on PDL. He writes about his efforts, and success to build a little 'scientific Perl' community within YAPC and Perl in general.
• 2012.06.30 in #49 Adapting PDL to a Big Data Landscape
  David Mertens makes the case of improving PDL and making it more popular riding the wave of the growing Big Data analysis field. There are some links to follow, for example to the PDL book.
• 2012.07.21 in #52 The Quantified Onion is not just another echo chamber
  David Mertens is planning to go out and engage the people who do science and present the Perl solutions that can help them.
• 2013.02.09 in #81 I <3 play-perl
  If the above descriptions did not help, then try how David Mertens explains Play Perl.
• 2013.08.21 in #109 C::TinyCompiler, a just-in-time C compiler for Perl
  
• 2013.08.21 in #109 XS::TCC, another tinycc-based jit compiler
  
• 2013.11.16 in #121 Introduction to the Perl Data Language (PDL)
  51:22 min talk by David Mertens giving some 'simple' (as in simple astrophysics :) example, and then a bunch of resources to make it easier to get started. The approach is interesting as he keeps telling why is it better to use PDL than C, but only once does he mention the advantages of PDL over pure Perl.
• 2013.12.17 in #126 What?! CUDA::Minimal... works?
  It's great that it is minimal and that it works again, but what is CUDA? David Mertens explains: CUDA is a great framework for writing parallel applications that run on (capable) nVidia video cards.
• 2014.01.18 in #130 Lexical closures with END blocks warn, but Just Work
  So what does the END block do in Perl? Where can you put it? Will it warn when creating a closure? What is a closure anyway?
• 2015.04.08 in #194 How Perl + StickK helped me get organized
  David Mertens uses a punishment-and-reward system to get things done. Using the StickK website, he sets himself some goals. He manages to acheive them? A little more code enriches the Perl world. He fails? The site donates to the Perl Foundation using his credit card. Both ways, we win. I like that.
• 2015.06.30 in #206 PDL features I'd like to see in Perl 6
  PDL, the Perl Data Language is the basis of many of the scientific computations available in Perl 5. If you are into that sort of computtion (or if you use NumPy and want something better) then read this.
• 2016.08.12 in #264 Research on how module authors "negotiate" breaking changes in software package managers
  The survey is here.
• 2016.12.01 in #280 C::Blocks Advent
  David's doing 24 posts about his C::Blocks module, which lets you embed C in your code and have it compiled and run on the fly.
• 2016.12.12 in #282 C::Blocks Advent Day 8
  David continues his journey showing use C::Blocks. Visiting his user page will show you the full list of articles.
• 2016.12.21 in #283 C::Blocks Advent
  David started a series of blog posts about C::Blocks library (embeding a fast C compiler directly into your Perl parser).
• 2020.07.10 in #468 Chicago.pm Virtual Meeting: July 23
  David announced the virtual meeting of Chicago.pm.

If you are not yet subscribed, you can do it now. Free of charge:

This newsletter is about the Perl Programming languages.