Olaf Alders

• Website: www.wundercounter.com
• About: I hack on MetaCPAN, CPAN modules and other fun stuff.

Recent Actions

• Commented on PTS 2020 Cancelled
  Thanks for your collective work on this. It's much appreciated....
• Posted Creating a Twitter List of CPAN Authors to Olaf Alders

  I've been playing around with how to create a list on Twitter made up solely of CPAN authors. Full post here.

• Posted Managing Your Travis CI Config Files with App::CISetup to Olaf Alders

  App::CISetup can make starting and managing Travis CI config files trivial. Full post here.

• Posted How I Spent My Perl Toolchain Summit v2019 to Olaf Alders

  I was fortunate to be able to attend the Perl Toolchain Summit again this year. The MetaCPAN team worked hard. I've tried to summarize our efforts with this post.
  

• Commented on About the Various PANs
  Thanks Mohammad. The next post is already in the works. :)...
• Posted About the Various PANs to Olaf Alders

  I've put together a short blog post explaining what the various PANs in the Perl ecosystem are responsible for.

  Thanks to booking.com for sponsoring this blog post through their support of meta::hack.

  Read the full post at: ="http://www.olaf…

• Posted meta::hack 3 wrap report to Olaf Alders

  We had a blast at the latest meta::hack and we got a lot of work done. Our "greatest hits" have been documented here.

• Commented on I'm fully covered
  All of the coverage stats are generated by cpancover.com MetaCPAN is only returning the results provided by the cpancover API....
• Posted meta::hack is back! to Olaf Alders

  We're in Chicago and we're hacking on MetaCPAN.

  Read the full post.
  

• Commented on Hacktoberfest: Thank You
  You kept me really busy in October. ;) Congratulations on this. One thing you could consider is fixing up the .travis.yml config files for various distributions. For example, many won't have added the latest version of Perl or may not...
• Posted How lazy am I? to Olaf Alders

  Occasionally I find myself running some random Perl script from a Github gist or dealing with some code from a colleague that doesn't have proper dependency management (yet). It's a bit painful to

  • run the script
  • wait for it to die on a failed dependency
  • install t…
• Posted Perl Toolchain Summit 2018 Wrap-up Report to Olaf Alders

  I had a great and very productive time working on MetaCPAN at this year's Perl Toolchain Summit. I've posted the full report here.

• Posted WWW::Mechanize Best Practices to Olaf Alders

  Recently at $work we were discussing some of the behaviours of WWW::Mechanize when submitting forms. For instance, when you pass the fields parameter to the…

• Posted My "Go for Perl Hackers" Cheatsheet to Olaf Alders

  Last year I found myself working on some Go code at $work. When I'm trying to pick up constructs in a new language, I find it helpful to see how I would have done the same things in Perl. This sheet is far from complete, but I think it's already helpful. You can find it at

• Commented on Why I recommend using the "++" system of Metacpan
  We could set up MetaCPAN to stream some anonymized download logs to S3, where people could analyze them, if that's helpful. It has been discussed before. It's a low priority for us, but it's possible. I can see that there's...
• Posted vim, Ale, Syntastic and Perl::Critic to Olaf Alders

  As a vim user, I've used Syntastic for a long time. It's a great tool for syntax checking. However, I was recently introduced to Ale. Ale does a lot of what Syntastic does, but it does it…

• Posted Announcing meta::hack v2 to Olaf Alders

  It's that time of year again. The core MetaCPAN hackers are going to be hacking on MetaCPAN next month. We are still looking for some sponsors. Read the full post.

• Posted How I Spent my Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 to Olaf Alders

  This was my 5th year of being invited to participate in the Perl Tool Chain Summit (formerly Perl QA Hackathon). It was a real pleasure to be invited to a rebranded version of the same helpful event.

  For the second year in a row, MetaCPAN was well represented at the event. This is importan…

• Posted Viewing Your Module Permissions on MetaCPAN to Olaf Alders

  We're currently at the Perl Toolchain Summit in Lyon, working hard on improving MetaCPAN. One feature which we went live with yesterday is a view on CPAN module permissions. This means that you can now easily see which modules any CPAN author has permission to upload.

  ="http://www.o…

• Commented on Specifying the type of your CPAN dependencies
  I want to thank Neil publicly for writing these posts and this one in particular. There was a lot of info in this post that I just did not know about before reading this. It takes a special kind of...
• Commented on OrePAN2 Processes MetaCPAN Lookups in Chunks
  So, what you got was me dumping a story from an internal bug tracker into a public bug tracker (GitHub). The micromanagement you see was me detailing how to go about dealing with the issue so that other developers on...
• Posted Tomorrow is LWP Hack Night to Olaf Alders

  Toronto.pm is hosting a LWP Hack Night tomorrow (Thursday) evening @ 7 PM. If you're interested in attending in person or virtually, I've put together a getting started guide. You don't need to be in the know in…

• Posted meta::hack Wrap-up Report to Olaf Alders

  We had a great four days at meta::hack a couple of weeks ago. I've tried to briefly summarize what we accomplished.

• Posted Getting To Travis and GitHub URLs in a Hurry to Olaf Alders

  Disclaimer: I'm sure this functionality exists elsewhere, but this was a fun little thing for me to work on. Also, you'll need a minimum of git 2.7 for this to work.

  Often, when I'm working locally I like to bounce right over to a GitHub repository url to check something. I ended up writ…

• Commented on PRC 2016 - Second Trimester
  Thanks for all of your contributions. It can be a bit disheartening to see your work (seemingly) get ignored. These are all very busy authors, though, so if they don't get to stuff right away, it's not personal. Having said...
• Posted How to Get a CPAN Module Download URL to Olaf Alders

  Every so often you find yourself requiring the download URL for a CPAN module. You can use the MetaCPAN API to do this quite easily, but depending on your use case, you may not be able to do this in a single query. Well, that's actually not entirely true. Now that we have v1 of the MetaCPAN API…

• Posted Easy OAuth Integration with Runkeeper and Spotify to Olaf Alders

  I've been tooling around with a fun little app that I'm building on evenings and weekends. As part of that work I figured I'd let users authenticate via Runkeeper. Luckily Runkeeper uses OAuth2 and it's all pretty easy to get going with. I've published my very small contribution as

• Posted MetaCPAN at the 2016 Perl QA Hackathon to Olaf Alders

  We made some very good progress on MetaCPAN at this year's QA Hackathon in Rugby. The whole post can be found here.

• Commented on Mocking a User Agent
  I set up some mocking for PayPal's ancient PaymentsAdvanced API. https://metacpan.org/pod/WebService::PayPal::PaymentsAdvanced::Mocker It works with Test::LWP::UserAgent, but you can also just fire it up as a standalone service (it uses Mojo) to run queries against. It's one example of how to...
• Posted HTTP::Response may have a different definition of success than you do to Olaf Alders

  

  The is_success() method which HTTP::Response provides is not necessarily a full indicator of success. This has bitten me before, so I thought it was worth writing about. Perhaps it may save you some heartache down the line.

  ="http://…

Comment Threads

• Ben Bullock commented on Why I recommend using the "++" system of Metacpan

  > We use ~100 CPAN modules for our closed source application and nobody has a clue.

  Yup. I'm using many people's modules which the maintainers of the modules don't have a clue about. The Encode::Detective experience taught me that sometimes people might even be using something I thought of as an experiment. Sometimes I have had the odd experience of sending a bug report to a maintainer of something and they don't respond at all or they think it's not important, whereas it's actually something causing a crippling fault in a running system. Or sometimes they have added "playful" or "am…

• faraco commented on Why I recommend using the "++" system of Metacpan

  I wholeheartedly agree with this post.

• Buddy Burden commented on Why I recommend using the "++" system of Metacpan

  Well said. I've gone and ++'ed all the modules I regularly install on every new Perl installation I create. Thanks for the reminder.

• Aristotle commented on I'm fully covered

  It doesn’t make any difference to users whether MetaCPAN runs the coverage checking itself or endorses the data generated by another service. The weight given to the data by MetaCPAN is the same.

• Ben Bullock commented on I'm fully covered

  Yes, metacpan is advertising these coverage results on their web site.

  For whatever reason, the coverage results are appearing inconsistently:

  https://metacpan.org/release/Table-Readable

  has no link but it's here:

  http://cpancover.com/latest/Table-Readable-0.03/index.html

  There are quite a lot of these glitches in the links, which don't seem to be formed correctly in many cases.

  Some of the coverage ratings seem to …