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We’d like to thank our sponsors for stepping up to support us. We really couldn’t do this without their support.

You too could sponsor YAPC.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

If you're not familiar with Dancer, it's a Perl framework written by Alexis Sukrieh and inspired by Ruby's [Sinatra](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinatra_(software)) framework. Though some call it a "micro-framework", according to Wikipedia, Sinatra is used by Apple, BBC, the British Government, LinkedIn, Engine Yard, Heroku, GitHub, and Songbird. That impressive list shows that Sinatra, and thus Dancer, is far more powerful than you might think at first glance.

So far, while I love Catalyst, I've found that I'm hacking out a Web service much faster with Dancer than I would have with Catalyst and I used Catalyst quite a bit. I've submitted a couple of minor patches, but I'm very happy with my latest enhancement to Dancer.

Stockholm Perl Mongers and our fellow Nordic Perl Mongers arranges the annual Nordic Perl Workshop in Stockholm, Sweden in the beginning of the summer (late may / early june). This is the third time the workshop is arranged in Stockholm and the 10th time
in total.

Nordic Perl Workshop is a workshop for the community by the community and we want you to submit interesting and inspiring presentations in order to make the workshop successful. Talk lengths are the usual 20 and 40 minutes but we might consider
longer ones if motivated. Any subject is welcome as long as it's related to Perl somehow - from algorithms for social graphing and web-technologies to Perl5 core optimizations and language implementation targeting the Parrot VM. To submit a talk either do
it online on the workshop website[1] or to claes at surfar.nu. If submitting via email please prefix the subject with [NPW].

Please submit talks no later than Monday 30th of April. Accepted speakers will be notified Friday 4th of May.

Sinan Unur is sponsoring YAPC::NA 2012!

Sinan Unur is an economist and developer who appreciates the beauty, power, and convenience of Perl, especially when he is not allowed to use it. He blogs about Perl and other programming topics on ν42 and you can usually find him answering questions on Stackoverflow.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

View image

Using multiple windows, multiple tabs, code folding, auto-complete, perl-support Vim script and taglist source code browser script.

Registers, markers, jumplists are not very expressive in a screenshots. Anyway I suggest Vim users to try the perl-support plugin. It may considerably speed up your development process.

It always amuses me when I see people talking about Vim or Emacs using words like primitive editor. I know that those people are usually the kind of people that have no idea what these editors can do without that much customization. Also regarding speed, they are usually no match for a Vim or Emacs experimented user.

(I used to be a Java programmer using Netbeans and Intellij IDEA not long ago :). In fact I still use Java occasionally.)

As requested in the Fight Night post, here is a screenshot of a Perl file loaded in Vim (in this case CGI::Simple).

Pod::Perldoc is a "dual-life module" that ships with Perl core, but also sits outside of it. Over the weekend, I released Pod::Perldoc 3.17 which incorporates several bug fixes and adds several new features.

In the latest release we've:

• Added better support for UTF8 in the pod -> *roff -> *roff-formatter -> pager pipeline - unfortunately a lot of UTF8 support for pod remains at the mercy of *roff-formatters. People running perl on Mac OS X, for example, will get old crufty versions of groff that do not process UTF8 input, even though Pod::Man supports UTF8 output.

• Improved support for $PAGER and $PERLDOCPAGER definitions that expect pipelines or input redirection

• Improved behavior of -l -q

• Added two new formatter classes (ToANSI and ToTerm) which bypass many of the UTF8 problems with *roff-formatters.

• Made it easier for downstream utilities to define their own command line arguments

• Closed over 20 bug tickets on the RT queue. Some of these bug reports were years old unfortunately.

If you plan to park at YAPC::NA 2012, either during the day or overnight and want a guaranteed parking spot, you need to reserve it before May 15th. 

Fill out this form to reserve your parking spot.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

I'm finally taking advantage of the co-maintainer bit that Yuval Kogman gave me last year and putting out new releases of MooseX::App::Cmd.

So, I had actually been wondering this for quite a while as I had thought that I would at some point be asked to typeset a journal or conference proceedings. I searched on Google but I could never get anything worthwhile to come up. However, I decided the time for research was over and the time to just attempt it was on me; this is also because I now have a publisher for the colloquium proceedings that I am running in the summer.

So, first of all some code

On one hand, I love getting bug reports for my Cucumber on Perl distro - it means people are using it, which is nice. On the other hand, I wish I hadn't but the bugs in in the first place...

LinuxFund.org is sponsoring YAPC::NA 2012!

Linux Fund is a community-neutral 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides financial and administrative support to the open source community. We have given away over $750,000 to open source events and projects around the world since our founding in 1999 using funds raised through our line of credit cards and direct donations.

Our primary focus is to bring promising OSI-compliant software projects to production status and foster the community efforts surrounding them.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

"Mike" asks on blogs.perl.org "Is the book worth buying?", specifically asking about The Definitive Guide to Catalyst.

I wrote this over a year ago, but I never posted it. I found it again when I was writing Can you learn Perl from an old Learning Perl?. I still like it, so I've give it to you.

At the heart of this question is (probably) the definition of economics: "How do I spend my limited resources on any of my alternatives to reach my goal?" There are, at least, three components there:

• Your resources (money, time)
• The alternatives
• Your goal

The first two are easy to quantify. You probably know how much money, time, and effort you want to spend. You can easily get a list of books available for acquisition (donation, purchase, library loan). The third one is a bit more complex, and the hardest one for a book's author to satisfy. It's also the one that makes Mike's question almost impossible to answer, so start with that.

What are the goals?

Courtesy of the Hacker News Twitter feed, I read a really interesting piece from slate.

Where's _why? by Annie Lowrey

Ostensibly, the article is about the former Ruby developer, enthusiast, mascot and resident oddball named "_why". He dramatically disappeared from the open-source world dramatically one day, taking all of his software and writings with him. But that's not the only theme of the article.

The article's driving thread is the author learning some basic programming, and learning in part from _why. The more interesting thing is the outsider-become-closer-to-insider perspective on the hacker culture. This include the response of the Ruby community to _why leaving and the effort to find, save, and adopt his works.

Read it, I found it thought provoking and a great read.

We've already mentioned in the "Call for Speakers", that we'd like to print proceedings for this years' YAPC::Europe. We think that proceedings are a good way to call back the talks you have heard and to get more information about topics you were unable to attend.

It would be great to have a "book" with (nearly) all talks of the schedule...

So we ask the speakers to send their talks as papers, too. We use the tools that were created for the German Perl Workshop many years ago. As this is a proven toolchain, we can provide packages that the speakers can use to write the papers. There is a package for each of these three formats: Pod, PerlPoint, LaTeX. You can find the "HowTo" on our website.

Please send your papers to proceedings@yapc2012.de.

If you want to reserve a dorm room for YAPC::NA 2012, then you have only 2 weeks left to do it. Reservations officially close on May 14th.

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]

As Joel Berger wrote in a previous post both Mojolicious and Bootstrap from Twitter are awesome frameworks.

I have created a boilerplate in order to have a starting point for we application development and put it on github. On the first page of the repository there are mentioned some of the features and things this boilerplate will help you with, like:

• Configurable application menu based on user type
• Unified user notification through messages displayed (alert, success, info)
• Examples of using the Mojolicious sessions

• Slide Gallery
• Grid Photo Gallery

The photos in the gallery are from the first Cluj.PM meeting from 2nd of March 2012
(Thank you Ovidiu for making such beautiful pictures ).

The boilerplate can be seen in action on dotCloud if you want to see how awesome web applications look with Bootstrap.

I have to keep this post short because I run out of time for today, but I want to invite you to give a try to this boilerplate, use it and abuse it - of course, contributions are more than welcome and will be rewarded with fame and glory, displaying contributors name on the front page of the repository :P

Having been liberated from Perl 5.8.8 only recently (and not completely, really), I've never used given/when. rjbs explains some gotchas.

From http://irclog.perlgeek.de/crimsonfu/2012-03-16#i_5305433

I'm sure you remember the good ol' days of typing programs straight out of a book hoping to see something which looks like this: