preaction

Last week, Andy Lester (author of Land the Tech Job You Love) came to talk about tools to help programmers work more efficiently and the 2.0 release of his Ack search tool.

A co-worker came to me today with a curious error message:

use DateTime;
my $date = DateTime->new( year => 2013, month => 4, day => 15 );
$date->set_time_zone("Australia/Sydney");
print $date->today;'

This code gives the error Can't locate object method "_normalize_nanoseconds" via package "2013-04-15T00:00:00" at /usr2/local/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.16.3/lib/site_perl/5.16.3/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/DateTime.pm line 252.

The package "2013-04-15T00:00:00" is the curious part: It looks like a stringified DateTime, but who could possibly be stringifying a DateTime object and then using that as a package name?

At the Bank we have a home-grown ETL framework that we've been using for quite some time. We recently completed a total rewrite, but unfortunately we left out a few changes. Had I gotten those changes in 5 months ago, I would have only had to break the API of about 10 modules. Today, in order to make those changes, I have to break the API of 122 modules.

What follows is an account of this ordeal, provided for entertainment value only. There will be a future post that explains some of the things I did to make this task surmountable.

At this month's Chicago.PM meeting, I gave a presentation on Dependency Injection and my new module, Beam::Wire.

[EDIT: The presentation doesn't appear to work on mobile devices. I'm trying deck.js, and I'm not sure I like it.]

February's meeting was about the Mojolicious Web Framework. Joel Berger has written a minimal Perl CMS called Galileo, and agreed to give a talk about the benefits of Mojolicious.

Best of all, the talk itself was written in Mojolicious! As Joel was talking, he was able to edit the code and display the results, showing off various features of Mojolicious like:

• Websockets
• Easy testing (even of websockets)
• Helper scripts
• Mojo templates

There are quite a few interesting parts of Mojolicious that make it worth giving a look to, and I hope to be able to do so with some web projects that have been sitting in my queue for a while (I wrote a nice ticket tracker with AngularJS, but the backend is Python, I'd like to fix that glaring mistake).