Many thanks to the 124 respondents, who made up 37% of the attendees. Although we usually experience a greater response from European attendees, the responses we did get still give a reasonable picture of the attendees. Once again it seems the attendees are getting older with the average age of an attendee being in their mid-30s. For a good proportion of the respondents this was their first YAPC, so we are still encouraging newcomers to get more involved in Perl community events. With 327 attendees in total this was the 3rd highest attended European YAPC (only just behind Vienna (340) and Lisbon (330)).
Today I had to install fresh Perl on one of my dev boxes and I was thinking if there is easy way to grab and install all of mine favorited distributions on metacpan.
I wrapped that into simple script, that reads all the favorited distributions from metacpan, using Mojo::UserAgent and installs them using cpanm.
Here's a list of 30 url mappers I'd like to treat as per the list of 122 class builders. Please comment re adds or deletes, evaluation criteria, whatever.
Sometimes excess laziness is not a virtue. Whenever I add a dependency, I used to just write in dist.ini:
Foo::Bar=0
This is of course not correct. Starting from last week, I've changed this habit. now I write the version which was currently installed on my development laptop/PC at the time of writing. And if I am not lazy, I try "cpanm Foo::Bar" first to update it to the latest version.
If I could kick the Amazon SimpleDB we have, I'd take great delight in doing so. Thankfully, our days of relying on it are numbered ... in a good way. More news on this will be forthcoming soon.
Could your module or project benefit from having someone
fix a specific bug
add a test for a specific feature
improve test coverage by 5%
write a tutorial
create a screencast for beginners
write an example program
create a homepage for the module
?
If so, you could be in luck. These are all potential tasks for students in this year's Google Code-In.
Following on from our success last year, The Perl Foundation is hoping to take part in the Google Code-In again this year. GCI is a programme similar to the Google Summer of Code, but aimed at students between the ages of 13 and 17. Students complete short well defined tasks for open source projects, and the two top students from each organisation will be invited to visit Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California for a five-day trip.
Currently we (renormalist and Caldrin) work on a more out-of-the-box usage based on the raw CPAN modules, to minimize the necessity of /etc/init.d/ struggling and Tapper-Deployment for some simpler use-cases like "ssh" in contrast to the full-blown "machine-setup-from-scratch for virtualization".
Executable notation with Marpa just as the relational algebra is executable with SQL.
Looks like an algebra of grammars be defined in terms of their parseable sets (Algebra of Sets). Then I *F must parse only integers (intersection).
And then, if a problem domain can be reduced to an algebra of parseable entities, it must be parsed by an algebra of grammars with all benefits of mixing, matching, and reusing grammars at will.
That's all probably looks too trivial or too vague, but it starts making much more sense (to me at least) when doing general practical BNF parsing with Marpa::R2 now that grammars like this see the light of day.
I'm proud to echo the announcement that the Booking.com dev blog has just gone live. Quoting the announcement:
Booking.com is an online hotel reservations company founded during the hey-days of the dot com era in the 90s. The product offering was initially limited to just the Dutch market. We grew rapidly to expand our offerings to include 240,000+ accommodations in 171 countries used by millions of unique visitors every month - numbers which continue to grow every single day. With such growth come interesting problems of scalability, design and localisation which we love solving every day.
The blog is kicked off with just a quick, humble article of mine on a debugging module that I published after needing the functionality at work. In a given code location, it allows you to find where in the code base the current set of signal handlers were set up. We plan to publish new content regularly and have a few interesting stories already lined up. So stay tuned!
An in-house Dancer webapp that's running on EC2 needed an ACL (Access Control List): a list of IPs that are allowed to access the application. Here is how we've accomplished it in a few lines.
Welcome to Perl 5 Porters Weekly, a summary of the email traffic of the
perl5-porters email list. I'd hoped to get this published earlier, but
it didn't happen.
In the US, we just switched back to "standard" time on Saturday. Rah, rah
energy savings, but toddlers don't adapt well to legalistic time changes, so
I was up and at 'em at the butt crack of dawn this morning.
Enough complaining, let's get to this week's topics. I hope you wanted a
week full of discussion(?) around subroutine signatures, because that's what
we got.
perl-5.16.2-RC1 is now available
5.12.5 last call for patches
Consider Forbidding Developer Releases in Production Perls
Here's a list of class builders which I'd like to turn into a task to assess them (I'd mentor it) for Google's code-in. If you have any suggestions (add, delete), please do so in the comments.
Assessment would include features, outstanding bugs, reviews, date of last update, whatever. Perhaps even speed.
My job at Bank of America consists largely of data collection and storage. To collect data in Perl, I have to write XS modules to interface with the vendor-supplied native libraries. Because I want to know my code works, my XS modules come with robust test suites, testing that everything works correctly.
Since the XS module was intended to be used by other, larger systems, I decided to help those larger systems test their dependency on my module: I included a Test::MockObject that mocked my module's interface. By using my test module, the tests can try some data and see if their code works.
But the hardest part to test is always the failures. How do they test if the news service goes down in the middle of a data pull? How about if it goes down between data pulls but still inside the same process? How do they test if the user has input an invalid ID for data?
I've written a grammar in Marpa's new BNF interface,
to parse Marpa's new BNF interface.
In the 70's, when I learned parsing theory,
this was a very fashionable thing to do, perhaps because
yacc had done it,
in Appendix B of
the original 1975 paper.
By 1979, Hoftstadter's book Godel-Escher-Bach (GEB) was out,
and the next year it took the Pulitzer for
General Nonfiction.
Self-description, recursion, self-reference, self-embedding,
you
(preferably
autologically)
name it,
these things were all the rage.
Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi summarises his trip over the venues in Kiev during the last few weeks. He did a huge job and now the huge job for us is to pick up the best venue :-)
My friend and co-worker Pavel Zhitomirsky, who also organized the last TA.pm meeting, has made his second CPAN contribution: Net::Icecast2.
While trying to work with Icecast, he found that there is no Icecast 2 API on CPAN and decided to write one. As usual, he writes Modern Perl with all the usual bells and whistles: Moo (+ Sub::Quote), MooX::Types::MooseLike, read-only attributes, documentation, Dist::Zilla and so on.
It's on Github to hack on, and I assure you he is very cooperative. Feel free to help out, suggest improvements or offer any criticism.
