I'm on IRC just about all the time (my handle is "thaljef"). But I thought it might be interesting to actually schedule a session and invite people to come in and ask questions about Pinto, suggest a feature, report a bug, or just say "Hi".

So there will be two one-hour jam sessions in the #pinto channel on irc.perl.org this Thursday, May 2. The first will at 14:00 and the second will be at 18:00 (all times GMT). If you haven't used IRC before, this is an excellent guide.…

Stratopan is a new service for hosting custom repositories of Perl modules in the cloud. Private beta trials will begin early this summer. If you'd like to participate in the trials, please stop by https://stratopan.com and leave us your email address. We'll contact you with all the details when the trials begin.

Stratopan will host both public and private repositories with any combination of proprietary and open source Perl modules. And Stratopan is built on Pinto/users/jeff_thalhammer1/2013/04/index.html

Since the crowd funding campaign for Pinto is already off to such a great start, I figured that I better roll up my sleeves and start writing some code. The primary goal of the campaign is to enable Pinto users to pull specific versions of modules into their repository without having to know precisely which distribution they came from. Read on to hear what I've done so far...

Last night, I went shopping for a service to monitor servers and API performance. So I looked at New Relic, AppDynamics, and a few others. From what I saw, none of them supported Perl.

That seems like a golden opportunity to me. Those companies are making some serious money (New Relic is likely to do an IPO this year). I think an enterprising Perl developer could get a piece of that pie.

If you put together the right hooks to support one of their monitoring agents from Perl, I am certain those companies would be happy to license you work from you. Or at least offer you…

As part of my work on Stratopan, I've setup a spankin' new CPAN mirror located at http://cpan.stratopan.com. It is an "instant mirror", so it should get new releases almost immediately after they ship to PAUSE. It also has everything from BackPAN too.

Other than that, it's not anything special. It's a mid-sized Linode server located in Texas with 8000 gigabytes/month of traffic. I get a warm and fuzzy feeling from hosting a CPAN mirror. It makes me feel like a more useful part of the community.…

That title may remind you of a certain song by The Fixx.

Last week a new version of CPAN::Meta was shipped to CPAN. Unfortunately, it caused a test to fail in Module::Build. In turn, that set off a whole chain of downstream failures in hundreds of distributions that depend on Module::Build.

So if you were building up a complete application stack last week (like on Stackato or Heroku) and you were pulling the latest dependencies from CPAN, you were hosed. This …