blogs.perl.org

I have posted a formal version of the Grants Committee 2014 report.

Here is another, a bit less formal and more personal version.

Here I am

I took over the position of the Grants Committee secretary at the beginning of this year. I wanted to try a lot of things, some of which went great, but others were challenging.

People change

Besides me,

• Daisuke Maki joined the committee as the first voting member from Japan. Perl community in Japan is often "invisible" and TPF is invisible in Japan due to the language barrier and he has been working hard to increase the visibility.
• Mark Jensen joined us as a grant manager. I am sure a number of you enjoy his grant updates already. Behind the scene, he spends good amount of time to help the grants run smoothly.

Grant rules change

• The grant evaluation is conducted every 2 months. It was quarterly until 2013.
• The grant limit was raised from $3,000 to $10,000.

Can't be a bad thing.

Challenge 1: Marketing

CLPM is my “Command Line Project Manager”. It’s a tool I wrote and have been using myself for several years now, and I am releasing it in the hope that others might find it useful.

Also, if you have been looking for an open source project to contribute to, here’s your chance! I don’t care what your level of experience is, if you think you have a useful comment or contribution, I’d like to hear from you!

There is a Todo section in the README, but I want to add a couple notes here:

1. It’s currently not packaged, nor does it have an installer. This probably makes it much less likely to be adopted.
2. I’m not sure how to promote it to make sure its audience (developers/sysadmins maybe) at least get a chance to see it, even if it ends up that it’s useful to nobody but me.

The project page has more details: https://github.com/tinypigdotcom/clpm

The original blog post is here.

When I was reading through Perl Weekly newsletter the other day, I realized that there is a challenge named 'CPAN Pull Request Challenge'. Everyone was invited to join, and I decided to give it a go. It was organized by Neil Bowers, who explained the details right here.

The idea was simple: For each month in 2015, each participant will be assigned a CPAN module. Then they will be asked to contribute to the code. Be it improving documentation, writing more tests to improve test coverage, fixing a bug or actually implementing a new feature, you were to do something and then submit a pull request on GitHub. As this challenge was open to 'anyone', there were several documents explaining how GitHub works, and how to submit your first pull request and what not. If you have a look at blogs.perl.org, you'll see several of them. Even if you're not going to participate, they are still pretty decent how-to documents, and having a look will not hurt.

So I've done a very little (and to some extent very monkey-typing) patch for January.
I was assigned to Test::Pod.
The story of my first fail is here, and a little summary of what has been merged is here.

As pointed out in my previous post (here), in the January assignment on the Pull Request Challenge, I got the Data::ObjectDriver module.

For this module I created two very simple pull requests. One regarding its management with Module::Install, that is quite dependent on the author's taste. That one wasn't merged yet and who knows if it will. The second one, also very simple, just fixed a test that relied on a DBD::SQLite error message that changed with recent versions. This PR was merged, and a development version of the module just hit CPAN.

Meanwhile, I think the most interesting achievement on this month challenge was that with this we got SIXAPART guys, that use this module heavily, to adopt it. Therefore, the current maintainer that did not have much time for it can now rest, and the module will get updated in the future. Also, the SIXAPART guys just resurrected their CPAN account.

This all to say that this challenge can be useful in quite different way.s

I recently started using Mojolicious and this week I encountered a problem when stashing data for rendering in the template.

I tried to stash a reference like this:

my $data = from_json($json_string);
$self->stash(data => $data);

Now when reloading the page it will just render something like HASH(0x85af7b0).

What has happened here is that the "data" variable is used by Mojolicious internally and that is what is rendered instead of the template.

If someone can write a better explanation or point to where this is documented please do so.

I cannot comment on http://blogs.perl.org/users/buddy_burden/2015/01/kiss-kiss-shebang-shebang.html (seems to be an MT bug)

So I'm trying to post an article.

FindBin had a bug for quite a while but was fixed in perl 5.16 as I wrote in http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=41213
Here's the bug report: https://rt.perl.org//Public/Bug/Display.html?id=89698

Still, people discourage from Findbin usage, either because they don't know about the fix, or because 5.16 is not used everywhere yet. (Or because of any other reason? tell me)

That's why I wanted to mention the fix here.