So yesterday, I started on the CPAN Pull Request Challenge. I was assigned the module Devel::StackTrace::WithLexicals, so, I read the doc and installed it.
With some encouragement from Neil Bowers, I'm tidying up my CPAN footprint. Over the years I've collected modules I did not write, permissions I never used, and all sorts of other situations that muddied the data when I what to create a list of CPAN objects I want to pay attention to. On the first day of the new year (check out the sweet Julian Date converter), I set out to tidy up.
Then, I made fresh versions of the modules I want to give up so their Makefiles, docs, and READMEs note that the module is unmaintained. I upload the modules into the ADOPTME user. That gets it out of the listings in CPAN Search or MetaCPAN.
In case you are interested I've published visitor-count numbers of some of the Perl-related sites such as search.cpan.org, metacpan.org and blogs.perl.org:
The CPAN PR Challenge is starting today. Latest polls have settled on 195 participants. People of all shapes and forms with different levels of Perl familiarity, experience, knowledge, and skill. Everyone seems excited and geared towards the challenge!
If you're participating, you might want to make use of the resources made available. I've tried to collect them here.
An interesting idea seems to be floating around the Internet ... creating a basic interactive website on how to contribute to a particular FLOSS project. After some noise on the Perl Monger Groups and Perl Propaganda lists I decided to help a few folks put together: http://whatcanidoforperl.org/ . You might have read something about it on Perl Weekly or not. If you have suggestions please create a ticket or better yet create a pull request here. Cheers!
In January more than 50 perl hackers will be starting the CPAN pull request challenge. They'll be randomly assigned a CPAN distribution and will have a month to submit at least one pull request.
Here I'll outline some things you can do to help the process, if you have distributions on CPAN, and are so inclined. Many of the particpants are relatively new to Perl, open source, and git(hub), so this is a way to help them "join in".
It's not too late to join in yourself — you can join at any time. Just email me: neil at bowers dot com.
Perhaps a misleading title. Seeing as this is not a political blog but a Perl one, I’m going to talk about method chaining, not worker’s unions.
Method chaining is the practice of consecutively calling methods on the return of a previous method. This comes in primarily two flavors. The first isn’t as common in Perl, though it is used extensively in Mojolicious, is when a method has nothing useful to return, it can return itself. This allows for say chaining setter methods $self->set_foo("FOO")->set_bar("baz"), or chaining related test methods
my $t = Test::Mojo->new;
$t->get_ok('/page/1/')
->status_is(200)
->text_like('#id' => qr/foo/);
While this is useful, it’s not my topic today. I’m going to talk about the more simple form, calling a method that returns an object, then calling a method on it, and so on.
I like to read at least a computer book every 2-3 months, that makes around six books per year. This year was a very unluky one for me, due to family and personal wealth problems and surgeries. However I'm back on the rail of reading computers book again, and Perl is the predominant one this year.
If you join the CPAN pull request challenge, then at the start of each month in 2015 you'll be emailed a (somewhat) randomly selected CPAN distribution. You'll have one month to submit at least one pull request. You don't have to be an experienced Perl programmer, CPAN author, or githubber. The goal is to help others, possibly learn something, and hopefully have a bit of fun.
If you want to sign up, email me (neil at bowers dot com), letting me know your github username and your PAUSE id, if you have one.