Olaf Alders

• Website: www.wundercounter.com
• About: I hack on MetaCPAN, CPAN modules and other fun stuff.

Recent Actions

• Posted Find expiring SSL certs using curl, Go and Perl. to Olaf Alders

  Just like domain name registrations, SSL certificates need to be renewed regularly, otherwise they expire. This means you now have one more thing to monitor. Let's look at ways to do this in Perl, curl and Go. We'll also get a quick introduction to a hosted Mojolicious app that I wrote to make…

• Commented on Good bye PrePAN
  The Perl Foundation does manage a bunch of domain name registrations for Perl-related sites. In this case, if the domain had been transferred to TPF, the squatting could have been avoided. So, something to think about for people who want...
• Posted The Perl Advent Calendar 2022 Call for Papers is Now Open to Olaf Alders

  In the year 2000, the world was a different place. Y2K was still fresh in our memories, many of us had just partied like it was 1999 and Mark Fowler had given up eating chocolate.

  Rea…

• Commented on Ideas from TPRC2022: Tools to help refactor large mature code bases
  perlimports is a good tool for helping to rewrite some code and reduce dependencies: https://metacpan.org/pod/perlimports PerlNitpick is a promising tool which would allow you to write plugins to rewrite existing code. I think it still needs some love, but it's...
• Posted Making Dynamically Required Package Names More Discoverable in Perl to Olaf Alders

  I've been using perlimports a lot at $work. I'm generally quite happy with perlimports, but it can get confused by modules which are being dynamically used. Fortunately, there's one little trick that can help in this scenario.

  ="htt…

• Posted Finding unused variables in your Perl code to Olaf Alders

  I've put together a brief overview of some of the ways to automate finding unused variables in your Perl code:

  https://www.olafalders.com/2022/02/22/finding-unused-perl-variables/

• Posted Opening Files Quickly from Inside vim to Olaf Alders

  I use ot a lot when it comes to opening files. I wanted to be able to use this tool from inside vim as well. It turns out, the solution is quite simple.

  Full post: ="https://www.olafalders.com/2022/01/05/open-this-file…

• Commented on On the eve of CPAN Testers
  I've found CPAN Testers to be extremely helpful lately in troubleshooting a new distribution that I've been working on. Many thanks to everyone involved in the CPAN Testers ecosystem for continuing to keep this valuable resource online and useful....
• Posted CPAN Bus Factor to Olaf Alders

  Perhaps you've noticed a new metric when browsing MetaCPAN?

  ="window.open('https://blogs.perl.org/users/olaf_alders/assets_c/2021/06/moose-4678.html','popup','width=1292,height=1404,scrollbars=no,resiz…

• Commented on PTS 2020 Cancelled
  Thanks for your collective work on this. It's much appreciated....
• Posted Creating a Twitter List of CPAN Authors to Olaf Alders

  I've been playing around with how to create a list on Twitter made up solely of CPAN authors. Full post here.

• Posted Managing Your Travis CI Config Files with App::CISetup to Olaf Alders

  App::CISetup can make starting and managing Travis CI config files trivial. Full post here.

• Posted How I Spent My Perl Toolchain Summit v2019 to Olaf Alders

  I was fortunate to be able to attend the Perl Toolchain Summit again this year. The MetaCPAN team worked hard. I've tried to summarize our efforts with this post.
  

• Commented on About the Various PANs
  Thanks Mohammad. The next post is already in the works. :)...
• Posted About the Various PANs to Olaf Alders

  I've put together a short blog post explaining what the various PANs in the Perl ecosystem are responsible for.

  Thanks to booking.com for sponsoring this blog post through their support of meta::hack.

  Read the full post at: ="http://www.olaf…

• Posted meta::hack 3 wrap report to Olaf Alders

  We had a blast at the latest meta::hack and we got a lot of work done. Our "greatest hits" have been documented here.

• Commented on I'm fully covered
  All of the coverage stats are generated by cpancover.com MetaCPAN is only returning the results provided by the cpancover API....
• Posted meta::hack is back! to Olaf Alders

  We're in Chicago and we're hacking on MetaCPAN.

  Read the full post.
  

• Commented on Hacktoberfest: Thank You
  You kept me really busy in October. ;) Congratulations on this. One thing you could consider is fixing up the .travis.yml config files for various distributions. For example, many won't have added the latest version of Perl or may not...
• Posted How lazy am I? to Olaf Alders

  Occasionally I find myself running some random Perl script from a Github gist or dealing with some code from a colleague that doesn't have proper dependency management (yet). It's a bit painful to

  • run the script
  • wait for it to die on a failed dependency
  • install t…
• Posted Perl Toolchain Summit 2018 Wrap-up Report to Olaf Alders

  I had a great and very productive time working on MetaCPAN at this year's Perl Toolchain Summit. I've posted the full report here.

• Posted WWW::Mechanize Best Practices to Olaf Alders

  Recently at $work we were discussing some of the behaviours of WWW::Mechanize when submitting forms. For instance, when you pass the fields parameter to the…

• Posted My "Go for Perl Hackers" Cheatsheet to Olaf Alders

  Last year I found myself working on some Go code at $work. When I'm trying to pick up constructs in a new language, I find it helpful to see how I would have done the same things in Perl. This sheet is far from complete, but I think it's already helpful. You can find it at

• Commented on Why I recommend using the "++" system of Metacpan
  We could set up MetaCPAN to stream some anonymized download logs to S3, where people could analyze them, if that's helpful. It has been discussed before. It's a low priority for us, but it's possible. I can see that there's...
• Posted vim, Ale, Syntastic and Perl::Critic to Olaf Alders

  As a vim user, I've used Syntastic for a long time. It's a great tool for syntax checking. However, I was recently introduced to Ale. Ale does a lot of what Syntastic does, but it does it…

• Posted Announcing meta::hack v2 to Olaf Alders

  It's that time of year again. The core MetaCPAN hackers are going to be hacking on MetaCPAN next month. We are still looking for some sponsors. Read the full post.

• Posted How I Spent my Perl Toolchain Summit 2017 to Olaf Alders

  This was my 5th year of being invited to participate in the Perl Tool Chain Summit (formerly Perl QA Hackathon). It was a real pleasure to be invited to a rebranded version of the same helpful event.

  For the second year in a row, MetaCPAN was well represented at the event. This is importan…

• Posted Viewing Your Module Permissions on MetaCPAN to Olaf Alders

  We're currently at the Perl Toolchain Summit in Lyon, working hard on improving MetaCPAN. One feature which we went live with yesterday is a view on CPAN module permissions. This means that you can now easily see which modules any CPAN author has permission to upload.

  ="http://www.o…

• Commented on Specifying the type of your CPAN dependencies
  I want to thank Neil publicly for writing these posts and this one in particular. There was a lot of info in this post that I just did not know about before reading this. It takes a special kind of...
• Commented on OrePAN2 Processes MetaCPAN Lookups in Chunks
  So, what you got was me dumping a story from an internal bug tracker into a public bug tracker (GitHub). The micromanagement you see was me detailing how to go about dealing with the issue so that other developers on...

Comment Threads

• Matthew Persico commented on On the eve of CPAN Testers

  So where can I RTFM on how to set up a smoker?

• Aristotle commented on On the eve of CPAN Testers

  I’m not sure, Matthew. I haven’t kept up with the topic in a couple of years so I only have vague memories to go off that I’d have to refresh. One thing I found just now is CPAN::Reporter::Smoker. I seem to remember there being multiple turnkey solutions on CPAN by different people (basically a few of the most prolific testers codifying their own setups), but I can’t find more than that one right now.

• Aristotle commented on On the eve of CPAN Testers

  (There are, of course, CPAN::Reporter itself for CPAN.pm and cpanm-reporter for cpanminus, whereby you can send reports for the day-to-day module installing that you do manually. But those are missing the endless loop of a dedicated CPAN testing rig, which would poll PAUSE uploads and download and test them as they come in. Which needs some extra code to deal with hung installers, downtimes at CPAN Testers, etc etc – all the robustness stuff you’d want in an automated setup.)

• kid51 commented on On the eve of CPAN Testers

  So where can I RTFM on how to set up a smoker?

  cpan Task::CPAN::Reporter

• Aristotle commented on Good bye PrePAN

  That’s a reasonable suggestion, but also feels like it’s missing the point in a way.

  My sense is that whoever ran the site lost interest in keeping it online, and the registration lapsing was just a symptom of that. Moving the registration to TPF would have addressed the symptom but not the real problem, which would be that there was not enough interest to even hand off the site to someone else properly (which I can understand – it takes care and effort, at a time when you can least be bothered).

  Now the site does appear to have been operational right up to the point th…