blogs.perl.org

So far I've found:

I've moved the "perlito" perl5 to perl6 compiler to a new home:
http://www.perlito.org/perlito/perlito5to6.html

• scalar(@a) is @a.elems
• $a[-1] is @a[*-1]
• fix "map" syntax
• eval-string is EVAL

I recently gave a talk at AmsterdamX.pm about web scraping. I provided a few examples of scraping (most of them on my Github repo), and amongst them, a few relating to the January assignments page Neil has put up.

In my quest to clean up my CPAN distributions and to normalize them, I've been working on CPAN::Critic, my unreleased tool that looks at my directory and complains about things I don't like. That's going nicely for the most part, but I ran into a small problem that's taken me down a bit of a rabbit hole of C++. All this in the same week I wrote a Python program.

I want to check that the minimum version of Perl the code requires is the same as the MIN_PERL_VERSION. We have two modules to do that, the PPI-based Perl::MinimumVersion and the Compiler::Lexer-based Perl::MinimumVersion::Fast.

However, I'm in love with postfix dereferencing, a v5.20 feature. PPI reports 5.004 and Compiler::Lexer thinks 5.008 because neither handle the latest syntax enhancements:

At YAPC::NA 2014 I talked about FFI and Perl. FFI is an alternative to XS that I think is worthy of consideration. My talk was well attended, I think primarily because I jokingly subtitled my talk "Never Need To Write XS Again". So there is a market for this idea. I mostly talked about FFI::Raw, which was a great way to experiment with FFI and to write real live CPAN modules with FFI right then and there. The question of performance inevitably came up, so at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop last year I talked about that.

The Perl Quality Assurance Hackathon (hereafter QAH) is an annual 4-day gathering of the people who work on the core CPAN toolchain and associated systems & services. This gives them dedicated time to work on these systems together, solving hard problems and working out how to move everything forward.

Like pretty much everything in the Perl world, these are all volunteers, so our approach is to get sponsorship to cover expenses (travel, accommodation, working space, meals) for as much of the gathering as possible. If your company relies on Perl, ask yourself how much you rely on the toolchain working smoothly? Perhaps you could persuade someone to sponsor the QAH this year?

The CPAN toolchain isn't glamorous, so generally doesn't get much press, but it's an essential part of our world. So over the next few weeks we'll be posting some short articles to raise awareness and hopefully encourage some sponsorship.

In the previous post I discussed my January Pull Request Challenge contribution. It's only part 1 because there's another part: the contributions others made during their PRC which were related to projects I'm in charge of.

I just noticed on the SLC-PM Facebook that the OpenWest Conference 2015 has called for Papers.

Last year it had a whole track for Perl topics. The content was excellent and can be viewed on YouTube.

And since I am posting stuff from their Facebook page, here is a talk from last months SLC-PM meeting.

Every week, I work with about a dozen SQL databases. Some are Sybase, some MySQL, some SQLite. Some have different versions in dev, staging, and production. All of them need data extracted, transformed, and loaded.

DBI is the clear choice for dealing with SQL databases in Perl, but there are a dozen lines of Perl code in between me and the operation that I want. Sure, I've got modules and web applications and ad-hoc commands and scripts that perform certain individual tasks on my databases, but sometimes those things don't quite do what I need right now, and I just want something that will let me execute whatever SQL I can come up with.

Yertl (ETL::Yertl) is a shell-based ETL framework. It's under development (as is all software), but included already is a small utility called ysql to make dealing with SQL databases easy.

You can generate your presentation slides programmatically with Perl 5 inside Docker container.

Source code example (left) and generate reveal.js slides (right) of my "Git (FS and DVCS)" course" presentation (full git-course-mj41 source code):

Already on GitHub github.com/mj41/prbuilder-docker. It's proof-of-concept but it worked well for me. Patches/pull requests welcome.

While I was focused on the social aspects of the PR Challenge, such as the IRC channel (opping literally everyone), the guides (wrote several), the repo (plus organization), and lately even a small parser for the web page Neil created (which will appear in another post), I still had my own responsibilities - mainly, my own PR challenge, and taking care of others' PR challenge contributions that fell under my purview.

I gave this talk about Automated Scoring Systems at MadMongers last week. This is part of the new crowd funding system we launched at The Game Crafter this week.

[From my blog.]

Hello,

As Neil categorized it in the title of this post, My first PR Challenge ( Poe::Component::DirWatch ) was definitely short , sweet and packed with value. When I attempted to work on this module I didn't find any issues to work on via the bug list. This lead me to jump into the PR Challenge irc chat where I got help from rjbs and ether on what I can do to submit my first pull request for this module. Of course the obvious answer was "Use the module" but while in the chat room rjbs did point out a bug ( documented here Moose::Classes ) that I ( without much experience on Moose) would not have been able to point out right away. After knowing this, I read some more Moose documentation and worked on my PR Challenge code .

This PR Challenge allow me to learn about Moose, namespace::clean and Test::CleanNamespaces ( The last 2 modules seem to be a better solution for my PR but I haven't installed the modules yet ) .

Thanks to everyone who pointed me in the right direction for my first PR Challenge.

Happy New Year!..

Oh my bad! I missed to post here that I made a Grant proposal.

It often happens. It obviously happens so obviously often during the last 15-20 years that the other day a guy (C# programmer) on Facebook commented: "CMS in Perl?!? "It will scale with your business" hahahaha". We obviously miss to say explicitly obvious things.

Yes, he does not know this is just a "Piece of cake" for us. Yes, it is so much "Piece of of cake" that almost nobody in the Perl community bothers to do it. Yeah, we have CPAN, we have CPANTESTERS, We have tied variables that some languages find very cool and trendy, and we even find them old fashioned, We are modern, we have Mo /o /se, ORMs and all the stuff, BUT "We suck at marketing".

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