The Underbar

Olaf Kolkman has had a long career in open source. In this first part, we discussed his involvement with Perl, DNSSEC and NLnet Labs.

As preparations are underway for the Perl Toolchain Summit 2026, this short episode is the last excerpt recorded during PTS 2025 (as a tangent during the CPAN Testers interview, published as episode 6). BooK starts by explaining the selection process for the Perl Toolchain Summit and some of the history, and then Doug, Ruth, Breno and Ferki reminisce about what makes the event so special.

This is the last of the interviews recorded during the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 in Leipzig, this time with the CPAN Security Group. We talked about how the group was formed, the security landscape for Perl and CPAN, and how volunteers are always needed.

During the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 in Leipzig, we interviewed the CPAN Testers team. They told us about the history of the project, its recent problems, and how a new team formed around its (then) lone maintainer. They also told us about their plans for the future.

During the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 in Leipzig, we interviewed Merijn Brand, Test::Smoke's founder, and Thibault Duponchelle, its new maintainer following the passing of Abe Timmerman, about the history of the project, and how to contribute to it.

During the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025, Salve Nilsen and I had a long conversation about the CRA and Steward Organizations. We thought it would be great to record another, to reach a larger audience with this topic. So we invited Olaf Alders and Julien Fiegehenn to join us, and pressed the record button.

During the Perl Toolchain Summit 2025 in Leipzig, we interviewed the MetaCPAN team about the history of the project, how it's managed and where it's going to.

The next version of Perl is going to be v5.42.0. Or maybe 42.0? Listen to Perl leaders arguing about what version numbers represent, and what it means to change one. (This is part two of a longer conversation started in the previous episode.)

For this episode, we assembled a cast of Perl leaders, and talked about Perl versions. At the end of the scheduled time, we hadn't started discussing the planned controversial topic, so we kept talking, and split the episode in two parts. To be continued...

This episode was an experiment: how hard can it be to record a podcast? Find a topic (the new Perl logo), a few people who have something to say about it, schedule a meeting, hit record, and presto, you are now a podcaster. And because it was an experiment, we numbered it 0.