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In brief, SiteSuite have agreed to host on the 14th of May.

Dates beyond that are up for grabs, and speakers are welcomed for any and all meetings.

Help promote by printing and hanging either the A3 or A4 poster around your workplace, university, college, local hang outs etc. but please ask for permission before hanging them!. Other PM groups are welcome to use them if they seem useful.

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I recently read an article about Aha! – A Hacker’s Assistant, a superoptimizer used to find branchless algorithms with brute force. There's a problem for which I always wanted a short branchless solution: finding the length of a UTF-8 byte sequence without a lookup table. So I gave Aha a try.

The length of a UTF-8 byte sequence is determined by its first byte. The possible sequences are:

• 1-byte sequences start with a byte in the range 0x00-0x7F
• 2-byte sequences start with a byte in the range 0xC0-0xDF
• 3-byte sequences start with a byte in the range 0xE0-0xEF
• 4-byte sequences start with a byte in the range 0xF0-0xF7

(There are a couple of other restrictions but I'm only interested in valid UTF-8 strings and don't care about the results for invalid sequences.)

I too was among the crowd that attended the Perl QA Hackathon 2015 in Berlin. Here's my report.

After looking at today's issue of Perl Weekly, I remembered of a nice advice by MJD that basically boils down to: make faces look at the content, or at least not look away from it.

My photo loaded on Gravatar was looking towards the right, which is good when your photo is put on the left of the page, but a disaster when it's placed on the right (which is what happens on Perl Weekly and here on blogs.perl.org, by the way).

The fault is totally my own: the general photo that might end up anywhere SHOULD look at the camera, so that it will be at least neutral in the general case! I changed it of course, even though I'm not sure I like the results... time passed!

One week ago I was in Berlin at the Perl Quality Assurance Hackathon (QAH), happily hacking away on MetaCPAN. Today I'll summarize the good, the bad and the ugly about my time in Berlin. Spoiler alert: it was all good.

The full post is here.

Hi everyone,

I am proud to announce another release of Dancer2, carrying many changes and improvements, with 9 contributors and 21 tickets closed[1].

This release carries the following major changes:

* Workaround for multiple plugins with hooks.
* "send_file" is asynchronous by default. Fallback to synchronous.
* "prefix" now supports the entire route path spec ("/:var" now works in prefix).
* Clear up prefix inconsistencies ("/var" vs. "/var/").
* Proper package reported in logging.

The QA Hackathon wouldn't be possible without the support of all of our generous sponsors. In this post we cover the sponsors not previously thanked here, including the individual members of the Perl community who made personal donations.

You can read about some of the things done at the hackathon in the blog posts, linked off this page on the QAH website.

Hi guys,

Let me announce my new Perl related site devoted to all the Perl books ever published: allperlbooks.com.

This is a collection of the Perl book covers, primarily from the private library of Liz and Wendy. You might have seen these book shelves at the Perl booth at FOSDEM or at one of the Dutch Perl Workshops.

I would be very appreciated if you will share more Perl book covers with me, my main interest is non-English books (maybe except Russian ones as I have a few dozens of them, and probably almost everything which was published in this language).

For the funny part, here's the page where you'll find a pearl on the book cover :-)

Feedback is also welcome.

yeah me too ....

Or lets call it insights from an imposterer. I just came because I like the people and I could visit my brother and maybe Berlin art galleries. (which I did). I knew the place because German Perl Workshop two years ago was here too. So i could show people the way to the pub when they left work from day one I just came from train station and could immediately say hai to ingy - perfect.

You might be overwhelmed by all the reports about the QA Hackathon. I am impressed and thankful! I just wish each report had a different title :).

I am especially grateful for the people who have collected the posts. It's much easier now than next year when someone will look for justification to attend or sponsor the event!

I was at the QA Hackathon in Berlin this year.

Everyone else writing about it has an introductory section about what it is, so I needn’t concern myself with one… as well we’re on blogs.perl.org here after all.

In a stupid move, I forced myself to constantly look for some other hacker to mooch power from – I left my own power supply at home. Fortunately as a semi-reluctant initiate to the Apple cult, I found plenty who were of the same hardware persuasion, whom I could bum some laptop juice of life from. I hope to not repeat this part.

But the main reason that I chose to be present at all was for the consensus discussions scheduled this year.

I published a new article about Perl in my blog. It's about wrapperl, a wrapper for Perl customized invocation. Find the article here and happy reading!

This was a busy month in my teaching duties. Also, needed to debug and create pull requests for other projects. Nevertheless, I managed to create a small pull request in the PRC assigned module, Google::ProtocolBuffers Perl implementation.

The pull request was a validation of the google spec, adding a test for enumeration values with aliases. Looking to the existing tests it was not clear if that functionality was implemented. Therefore, my test was to know if I should try to implement that functionality or not. Fortunately, the tests passed. And because more tests is always good, this month PR is just a small test: PullRequest.

I hope I can get real contributions in my next assignments, but lately the time is not much.

Last post - the post that hurts the most.

It's been a while that I blogged. Yet, it's a tradition now to write my report about the Perl QA hackathon as probably the last one of the attendees. The 2015 edition of the Perl QA hackathon was a lot of fun. I'm one of the less visible guys there so I want to give some visibility into my work.

My topic is benchmarking.

Benchmarking the Perl 5 interpreter.

Over the years, I narrowed down that topic beginning with the problem statement over several steps: the search for workloads, the creation of a framework for executing and producing meaningful numbers, the bootstrapping of Perl with CPAN, ensuring a stable CPAN, a system to store benchmarks together with general testing results, and the actual execution on dedicated hardware.

You can recapitulate some intermediate steps here:
Perl Workloads - YAPC::Europe 2010
Perl::Formance - YAPC::Europe 2011
Perl::Formance / numbers - YAPC::Europe 2012

With the 3 projects that hold my overall vision together being those:
bootstrap-perl
Perl::Formance
Tapper

Test Driven Development by David Delikat

[From my blog.]

So, it turns out that working full time on a great contract, overseeing employees/contractors on other contracts, trying to build an MMORPG, working through legal issues associated with said MMORPG, preparing conference talks, and trying to be a good husband and father is a wee bit time-consuming. That's why I probably didn't answer your email or write a blog post in the past month.

So to let those interested in Veure know that it's not dead: we have bars! (Amongst many other things). Read on!

Alien::Base has made a great deal of progress since last September when Joel Berger turned over day to day development for the project to the then newly created Alien::Base team. We’ve closed most of the major issues and pull requests. One remaining important issue will hopefully be solved soon (I will get to that later; if you are an Alien::Base user you may want to skip to The Future below). Stability and reliability has improved to the point where it is good enough to be used by real projects. My own FFI::Platypus depends on Alien::Base tech to provide libffi, as an example. I’d like to see some other projects take advantage of Alien::Base as well.

What have we fixed? A number of things:

CPANdeps has always shown what your code depends on as a tree. But the reverse dependencies - that is the report of what code depends on yours - has always just been a list. Until now. And, of course, it's all available as XML so you can more easily use it as a data source.

If you want to generate reports from this, please be gentle!

I am finally home from the perl-qa hackathon in Berlin. For me personally I consider this hackathon a huge success. I think many things happened at this hackathon that will propel the perl5 ecosystem forward.

Before diving into details, I want to thank my employer, DreamHost for sponsoring my attendance at the hackathon, they paid for my travel and hotel. DreamHost also went a step further by providing the perl-qa group with a dreamcompute account we were able to use to do smoke testing among other things.

So, what did I accomplish at the hackathon? The simple answer is Test-Simple.

On the first day of the hackathon we had a group discussion related to Test-Simple (Test::Builder, Test::More, etc). This discussion was made up of 3 parts:

1) What from Test-Simple could be improved? If Test-Simple is going to be revamped, what things should change? Who would benefit from these changes? Are the benefits enough to outweigh the risk in changing Test-Simple.

Finally, the QA Hackathon 2015 in Berlin is over.

It was my first hackathon, and it was a pleasure to organize it. Just to mention a few, I want to thank Andreas for organizing at the venue and staying there as long as people wanted to stay and hack (like midnight), Wendy and Liz for serving all kinds of delicious food, Neil and Olaf for helping me contacting sponsors, Max from Frankfurt.pm for doing the paperwork and letting us use their bank account, BooK and Barbie for giving lots of useful advices for organizing and all the hackers for attending.