Al Newkirk

• Website: ana.im/
• About: ... proud Perl hacker, ask me anything!

Recent Actions

• Commented on The Four Major Problems with CPAN
  I totally agree with your post, I also totally agree with the last comment, less the dismissive tone. Having used C# and the .NET framework I can attest to it's robustness and awesomeness. That being said, for the sake of...
• Commented on The Main Problem With CPAN Modules On Github
  About a year ago I was squawked at about this so I altered my dist.ini file to copy the generated Makefile.PL and put in it the repo, then I worked this approach into my release process. The dist.ini file is...
• Commented on Please build this for me, yesterday, also!
  Net::EmptyPort and Test::TCP both look great, I will use them....
• Commented on Please build this for me, yesterday, also!
  Finding an "empty_port" is trivial, and there are many ways to do it. Finding an "empty_port" is not the "hot dog" (essential part of the experience), the "hot dog" is in being able to "reproduce results". For example, let's say...
• Posted Please build this for me, yesterday, also! to Al Newkirk

  use Port::Authority;

  Port::Authority would be a module which assigns and tracks ports for use with multiple application servers running on the same box. It would need an algorithm, capable of generating reproducible results, to generate port numbers in which are available, maybe it could b…

• Posted Please build this for me, yesterday! to Al Newkirk

  #!/usr/bin/env perl

  =head1 NAME

  App-sourcery

  =head1 USAGE

  # loads all @assets within $path and reports any not referenced in at-least one of the @sources
  ./sourcery --path=/var/www --asset=*.css --asset=*.js --asset=*.png --source=*.html

  =hea…

• Posted The Power of the Sun, in the Palm of your Hand to Al Newkirk

  Over the weekend I worked on a new Perl library, MongoDB::QueryBuilder, a tool which is designed to simplify composing complex and dynamic queries for MongoDB in a chainable and object-oriented fashion.

  Seldomly do we see examples of querying a MongoDB datastore of significant size and com…

• Commented on Form Rendering: Why Do We Even Bother?
  @Ron, yes, you're absolutely right. I fixed that shortly after the release went out. Validation-Class 7.900014 doesn't have that dependency at all. Also, you can cpanm the github tarball if you like....
• Commented on Form Rendering: Why Do We Even Bother?
  @Ron/@Jerome, I encourage you to dive into the Validation::Class space, specifically, you should first read Validation::Class::Whitepaper. @Ron, you asked if I meant Regex/p/::Common, I'm not sure what you mean by this, please clarify. The module reviews page is pretty cool...
• Posted Form Rendering: Why Do We Even Bother? to Al Newkirk

  Over the holiday I decided to do some development work even-though I had promised myself I wouldn't work on any open-source projects until all my commercial projects

  I was bored, and since the alcohol and party-favors had lost there seductiveness, I thought I might revisit …

• Posted A Killer Feature for Mojolicious to Al Newkirk

  I just thought of a truly killer feature for Mojolicious. You are undoubtedly GitHub, etc. Most of you undoubtedly already know the answer to that, but I digress.

  Many shops that I've worked with have this conc…

• Posted Say it once, Don't Repeat It to Al Newkirk

  The following is a story about me (you can call me "guy") who was working as a
  conversation with one of the lead system architects (herein after referred
  to as God).

  One day, Guy explained to G…

• Posted Candy-Coated Data Validation; Codename: ShuhgaBear to Al Newkirk

  2-CENTS

  This week, in the intertubes, I came across a Node.js validation library which seemed to be popular amongst "those people". At-a-glance, as far as validation libraries go, I didn't think it was that well done, but I must admit to noticing a certain appeal in the expressiveness of…

• Commented on Validation::Class: Released version 7.900001
  Hey Gabor, that's a great question, thanks for taking the time to ask. The previous versions had tests which thoroughly tested its directives, validations and most methods. The 5% refers to a handful of methods that aren't automatically exported (meaning...
• Posted Validation::Class: Released version 7.900001 to Al Newkirk

  I wanted to formally annouce the release of Validation::Class, as of version compatibility at about 95%. The following is the current complete list of core directives (validation rules). As stated in the documentation, t…

• Commented on Operate with Impunity
  Steven, Glad to meet another fellow author, especially one that develops in the same domain as I. :} Thanks for comments on the documentation, the synopsis in both Validation::Class and Validation::Class::Simple have been minimized for the sake of brevity so...
• Posted Operate with Impunity to Al Newkirk

  I am 99.9999% done with a complete rewrite of Validation::Class. I have also written a decent amount of documentation on how you should use the library and why you should use the library.

  Within the documentation you can also find a whitepaper that offers insight into the rational behind t…

• Posted Sexual Harassment? to Al Newkirk

  package Company::Connection;

  use Moose;

  ...

  sub connection {

  my ($self, @args) = @_;
  
  # @Linda: I hope this isn't creepy but if you're reading this I just
  # want to say I think you're awesome and we should go out on a date
  …

• Posted Les Misérables to Al Newkirk

  09:41 alnewkirk> sooo fucking frustrated
  09:41 alnewkirk> this line just save-my-sanity -- https://metacpan.org/source/XSAWYERX/Dancer-1.3100/lib/Dancer/Template/TemplateToolkit.pm#L37
  09:42 alnewkirk> I couldn't figure out why my TT ren…

• Commented on Better, Faster, Funner - Part 1
  @Ben, its a web application (framework), its based on Dancer (which I mentioned) and simply talks about an approach I took towards deployment, template-rendering, form-handling, and configuration management. Also, I just like to clarify that I in no way am...
• Posted Better, Faster, Funner - Part 1 to Al Newkirk

  I've recently started working on a new web app project using all sorts of build it out. The architecture of this application is different from what I'm used to but I like the direction I'm headed, everything seems to be…

• Commented on Usability testing of CPAN modules
  Really great article and message, what we've basically done here is stumbled into our very own open-source quality assurance process, I hope others follow this lead. Also, for those that look beyond this article, Vyacheslav's critique was of Validation::Class version...
• Commented on Haven't Blogged in a While...
  #!/usr/bin/env perl package Twit; use Command::Do; fld command => { required => 1, min_length => 2, filters => ['trim', 'strip', sub { $_[0] =~ s/\W/\_/g; $_[0] }] }; mth run => { input => ['command'], using => sub { my...
• Commented on Haven't Blogged in a While...
  Flavio, good point with regards to the keyword usage. Making a change. Thanks. -Al...
• Posted Haven't Blogged in a While... to Al Newkirk

  ... anyway, .. so today, this 11th day of the month of showers, April, 2012 the year of our Lord (take your pick), ... I've released my latest Kracken on the world.

  World, meet Command::Do!

• Commented on Behavior Driven Development in Perl
  Hey Pete, No, Test::BDD::Cucumber is great and from what little I've seen of the source code, it follow the Cucumber spec whereas mine doesn't. I wrote my own merely for fun, also I wanted more control over how feature specifications...
• Commented on Behavior Driven Development in Perl
  I too have inspired recently by BDD. I think the name holds as each scenario tests a usage-pattern and not just methods. Furthermore, I've looked at the ruby Cucumber docs and Test::BDD::Cucumber and decided to roll-my-own parser for fun which...
• Posted Idea: Untitled - "Free Meetup Service for Software Developers" to Al Newkirk

  Hi, I've been thinking of developing a free meetup for developers, if interested please take this survey - http://www.surveybuilder.com/s/LKbJsWGcgAA

• Commented on CPAN as a Source for Startup Ideas
  Szabo, ... Well played sir. I agree 100%....
• Posted CPAN as a Source for Startup Ideas to Al Newkirk

  I've been wanting to write this post for quite some time, while this doesn't explore the topic in detail it at-least gets it out of my head an into yours (hopefully).

  CPAN (the comprehensive Perl archive network) is arguably the best thing about the Perl programming l…

Comment Threads

• jakoblog.de commented on The Four Major Problems with CPAN

  See this MetaCPAN feature request from one year ago. The more scoring indicators to be used for ranking in MetaCPAN, the better. How about explicit statements like "I prefer module Foo in favor of module Bar" to be used for ranking and as guides too?

• asknet999.myopenid.com commented on The Four Major Problems with CPAN

  Other than voting, metacpan or cpan site should include a counter that tells how many times a particular module has been installed or downloaded. This is one of the measurement used by many users when there is a huge catalog. For example, mobile apps installed from app store has this counter, the greasemonkey scripts installed from userscripts.org has something similar.

  What I believe, is CPAN model should be similar to Mobile app store, where the app store gives information like; reviews, rating, no of downloads, other modules by author, suggested modules and so on.
  …

• Brendan Byrd commented on The Four Major Problems with CPAN

  This discussion was held several times over the years. A solution INSIDE the CPAN package is pointless here. For one: It doesn't address anything about EXISTING packages, which are 99% of the problem, new modules are rarely having these problems. So next, if you mandate definition inside the META file, then someone will NOT do it, or do it wrong. What you have then? RIGHT, the exactly same state then before.

  Calm down. Some of the ideas are META improvements, but I think the bulk of the fixes would be the first two ideas: search engine improvements and better ways of handling…

• larryl commented on The Four Major Problems with CPAN

  @brian d foy said:

  > I am constantly and consistently surprised about how many
  > people do not first try to work with existing projects.

  For me, GitHub has been the single biggest factor in lowering the barriers to entry to making contributions to existing CPAN modules. I find I'm far more likely to contribute changes to an existing module when all I need to do is fork it and send a subsequent pull request. Maybe if more source code was handled via GitHub (or similar mechanism) there might be less of a tendency to reinvent the wheel as opposed to enhancing existing co…

• Buddy Burden commented on The Four Major Problems with CPAN

  Yet Another Problem with the ideas (not that I wish to discourage you--definitely keep pursuing these ideas, as they're much needed--but just to make sure you're thinking of all the issues) is that, while sometimes there is a "right" and a "wrong" module, sometimes there isn't. That is, sometimes there are two modules that both do the job and there just isn't a clear reason to prefer one over the other. Perhaps one is OO and the other isn't. Perhaps one has more features but the other has a simpler interface. Perhaps one works well for A but not at all for B, while the other…