During FOSDEM of 2024, mere days before the kick-off of CfgMgmtCamp 2024 in Ghent, Apple released a language named Pkl as Apache 2.0 open source.
As a heavy user of Pkl’s Apple-internal progenitor for four years at that point, I was well placed to give the first ever public talk about it, by the gracious request of the organizers - and there was no audience more suited than CfgMgmtCamp for an introduction to such a release!
Unfortunately the talk was not recorded, but since I was asked about the slides for it this year, I’m posting them for posterity.
However, much of the same content was covered during CfgMgmtCamp 2025 by the inimitable Philip Hölzenspies - one of the creators of Pkl - and that talk is available on YouTube!
Slides
Thanks again to the CfgMgmtCamp team for inviting me to speak at such short notice, and being (typically) accommodating. It is one of my favourite conferences, and more than a decade later is still “ground zero” for the topic of configuration management and infrastructure as code.