blogs.perl.org

At this point, I don't have a Perl blog. I do Perl things, but nothing that ever seems worth blogging about. However, I've decided to improve my knowledge of Perl 5i and Perl 6, and generally practice my proramming, so I'm going to work through a bunch of easy through to difficult problems in each language. Hopefully I'll pick up the idiomatic solution ideas as I go along.

Feedback and alternate solutions are also welcome.

At some point I may repeat the problems with Python, but not yet.

Problem sets I'm planning on starting with include:

• Code Katal
• Programming Praxis
• Project Euler
• Python Challenge
• Ruby Quiz archives

The latter two are language-targetted, but I believe that I should be able to gain some benefit from some of them anyway. Suggestions for other problem sets are welcome, but this is certainly enough to get me started.

I officially join Fruit Protectors R Us:

The pix of the tricks.

I've moved the development repo for OpenBedrock to GitHub.

http://openbedrock.blogspot.com/2013/12/openbedrock-moving-to-github.html

For the last dozen years or so the code base has been parked in a CVS repository. As I have been resurrecting the Bedrock project, I decided it might be a good idea to explore a different VCS. Although, CVS has been adequate, a move to GitHub marks (at least in my mind) a move toward a more modern approach to possibly extending Bedrock and maybe Bedrock's reach...or not. In any event, I found it an interesting weekend project to spend some time learning about git, how developers use it in their workflow and creating a public repository for Bedrock.

This challenge is a stencil quest on questhub: in each calendar month of 2014 you have to release a distribution that you haven't released before, and write a blog post about it. This might be an entirely new distribution, one that you've adopted, or one that you're helping with. The rules so far are:

• You have to release at least one such dist within each calendar month. You can't catch up, by releasing 12 in December.
• You must blog about the dist and link to the blog post in a comment on your quest. It doesn't matter if the blog post is in a following month.
• Renaming one of your existing dists doesn't count :-)

Come and join us!

I blame Jeff Thalhammer. He is the one who directed me to The ChangeLog, and that's where I've heard the interview with Katrina Owen, the creator of Exercism.io.

What is Exercism.io?

Lately, I’ve been pondering my relationship with Perl.  Every programmer has a different relationship with their language-of-choice, and it impacts how they approach many different aspects of coding, what features they like and which ones they hate, what they clamor for and what they disparage.  And these choices are always going to be challenged by our friends, our coworkers, and our open-source collaborators.  Which is a good thing, for the most part: being challenged is what keeps us honest, keeps us fresh.  Without constant challenge, we can lapse into dogma and cargo cult coding.  But we can’t properly defend our positions—can’t explain why we feel the way we do about certain things—unless we take the time to understand our relationship with our language.

So this is part 1 of an X-part series (we’ll just have to see how long it takes me to work through it all).  Primarily I want to explore this for my own self-awareness, but I hope it will be interesting to others as well.  And perhaps it will make some of my other blog posts make sense.

I begin at the beginning: how I came to Perl.

...in which I attempt to hold a webinar with AnyMeeting.

http://openbedrock.blogspot.com/2013/12/chromebook-acer-c720-day-12.html

At dinner after patch -p1, Wendy tried to convince me to come to FOSDEM 2014 in Brussels in February. That didn't take much convincing, although I'll have to figure out how to defray some expenses. I'd really like to give my "Instant CPAN Author" workshop again, where I take people through the entire process of getting a PAUSE ID, creating their first (simple) module, uploading it, getting a bug report, patching the module, and re-uploading it.

But then, Sawyer and I started riffing on that idea. We could also visit both Amsterdam.pm groups and maybe other close things. We started to get excited about a European Perl Tour, like I did in 2008 when Renée Bäcker organized several appearances for me in Germany and I was able to go through several other countries. We could tour like a band, with t-shirts, prizes, daily video updates, and a pull request a day. Curiously, we were the only ones not drinking that night.