Now would be a great time to remind your family that what you really want for Christmas is an all expenses paid trip to YAPC::NA 2012!
The dates are June 13-15 in Madison, Wisconsin. And while they’re at it, they should also send your spouse with you to enjoy the Spouses Program.
Just a quick FYI that I'll be presenting DB Critic (née DBIx::Class::Schema::Critic) tomorrow night at the monthly Philadelphia Perl Mongers meeting. We're in Room 307 of Levine Hall on the University of Pennsylvania starting at 7:00 PM.
Never, ever, forget a semicolon after the catch block when using Try::Tiny. I just got stuck debugging a little script for more than two hours...
Finally I found the way I like to program OO in Perl !
http://perl-node-interface.blogspot.com/2011/09/mo-moo-moose-not-really-stuttering.html
I’m not sure if you’ve ever stayed in a hostel before, but the hostel in Madison is pretty amazing. If you’re looking for the cheapest possible accommodations for YAPC::NA, then look no further. They can take up to 33 guests at a time, and charge only $22 per night. The hostel is about 10 blocks from the YAPC conference facilities.
Frankfurt am Main - better known as simply Frankfurt - is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth largest city in Germany. In 2009 over 600,000 peopled lived there and the Rhein-Main-Area (which is the second largest metropolitan area in Germany) has a population of about 5,600,000.
Frankfurt is the financial and transportation center of Germany: It is the seat of the European Central Bank, the German Federal Bank, the German Stock Exchange and the Frankfurt Trade Fair.
But Frankfurt was an important city in the history, too. The very first democratic elected German parliament had its seat in Frankfurt.
Sightseeing
I'm in the process of releasing DotCloud::Environment, a module that should ease the developer's life with providing a unified entry point to get dotCloud's configurations for an application.
A typical case I had while playing with dotCloud was that I could easily deploy an application, but I had no simple way to setup a basic test environment in my development machine. This is unfortunate because it shifts all testing on the deployed infrastructure.
When you create an application on dotCloud, you're probably going to have some services that resolve to code you have to write, other ones that resolve to data you're going to populate or use. The link that allows a code service to access a data service is the file /home/dotcloud/environment.json (or its equivalent YAML representation /home/dotcloud/environment.yml), so you know where to look for when you are in the deployed environment.
Sometimes I wish I could apply a filter named "only list serious modules" when browsing through CPAN. More and more people are mis-using CPAN as a personal storage for modules that are not usable for other people. Other useless modules (aside from those in the 'ACME' namespace) act as a pun on common modules like 'Moose'.
Especially when teaching newcomers how to use the CPAN this leaves a bad impression.
Experienced people quickly learn to skip those things but taking the archive more serious would be nice.
Best Practical has a Perl Hacker job opening that I thought many of you might be interested in. Here are the details:
We’re Best Practical Solutions, a small software company located in Somerville, MA. We build software and sell support, training, consulting, and custom development. Our main product, RT (Request Tracker), is the premiere open source issue tracking system. We’ve been around for a decade, and things just keep getting busier.
Well, so the Yen is at a historic high. Japan's hotels are expensive. We have a record low number of foreign visitors.
Historically, we asked fellow mongers (like Dan Kogai) to accomodate foreign guests, but we have never really spent money for foreign speakers who come all the way to Japan just to talk at our conference. I think it's a shame, but we have no mone...
Oh wait: we have almost 100 individuals who paid a little extra to become Individual Sponsors this year. We have a record-breaking 27 Corporate Sponsors.
Hmmmm... Okay!
During June this year, in Asheville, North Carolina, YAPC::NA assembled 251 people together to learn and discuss Perl, Perl projects and meet Perl people. The YAPC conferences are a perfect opportunity to tell the Perl community of your latest project, or to talk to other Perl developers face to face. YAPCs have now been running for 12 years, and each gets more focused and exposure than the last. In part in this thanks to all the previous organisers who have gone before, offering help and advice where they can. However, the YAPC Conference Surveys also help to provide value feedback to future organisers.
For YAPC::NA 2011, the survey results are now online.
At tomorrow's DC.pm meeting I'll be giving a talk similar to one I gave a long time ago at Phoenix.pm - a behind-the-scenes look at AJAX, targeting beginners. We'll discuss the history and cultural norms (aka Best Practices), as well as diving briefly into what is really going on (watching HTTP dumps). All wrapped up by "ok, now go use JQuery", though I suppose I shouldn't reveal the punchline.
Oh, and of course with Live Coding and using perl for the server-side bit :)
Come one come all!
We’re pleased to announce OHPA Software as our latest amazing sponsor for YAPC::NA 2012.
Ohio-Pennsylvania Software is a web application development firm dedicated to providing secure, reliable Internet applications and an exceptional level of customer service. We employ friendly, talented staff whose number one priority is the satisfaction of the customer. Our primary services include:
Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we provide quality software to clients in a variety of industries, from legal services to real estate, tourism, information services, publishing, photography, and nonprofit organizations.
For those who are not aware, there is a newish methodology called DCI (Data, Context, Interactions) which attempts to solve the problems of OOP. DCI was designed and proposed by the same guy that created the MVC concept that has become hugely successful. DCI is an attempt to group methods with their use cases so that interactions used by business logic and algorithms are more predictable.
The key to DCI is a separation of concepts:
I have created the DCI dist which includes helpers for writing Contexts and Interactions (DCI uses the terminology roles, but to avoid conflict with other perl concepts of roles I have called them casts.)
The DCI perl package can be found here:
If iframes are supported, this should show the synopsis for a common example of DCI.
Here are some links to information about DCI.
All was going well last month, we had a few problems balancing the feed and database inserts, but with some help from Devel::NYTProf, we had improved performance and were getting back on top of things. We also had two presentations at YAPC::Europe by myself and Léon, and were heading for 1 million test reports submitted in a single month ... when.....
The CPAN Testers server hard drive developed a fault. Tthis wouldn't have been a problem had the mirrored drive, which had failed earlier in the year been correctly replaced. Alas the first failed drive was still absent, with the second drive failing and switching to read-only mode almost immediately on reboot. As such I had just started to backup in case we lost the drive completely, and then it did fail completely :( Our hosting company required us to accept complete data loss before replacing the two drives.
I wanted to comment on kevin spencer's perlbrew intro but my blabbering grew so long I chose to make a separate post instead.
I used to use the #!/usr/bin/env perl trick for shebangs until (when reading about packaging executables with dists) I learned that ExtUtils::MakeMaker (and Module::Build) will automatically rewrite a full-path shebang to point to the interpreter used during install, but it specifically does not do this with the env trick.
I inadvertently combined 'env perl' with local::lib once and found that the script (reachable from my local::lib bin/) would die because I was trying to run a script in my path with a perl that didn't have that module installed (I must have switched perls in the meantime).
Lot’s of people have been contributing to the growing list of ideas in the YAPC::NA 2012 idea collector. However, many said that the labels on the buttons weren’t specific enough. To that end I’ve changed the labels to read “Interested”, “Don’t Care”, and “Not Interested”. Using these labels it should give us a clearer idea of personal interest level rather than just whether the idea has merit.
Given these new labels, feel free to go back and re-rate any items that you think have changed.
Telling people in the Perl ecosystem that YAPC::Asia 2011 is happening is a good start to let the world know about our beloved conference. Obviously people in that community are eager to hear about when the festivities are going to begin.
If your entire intention is to have fun with old pals, this is probably enough of a marketing. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I have something else in mind: I want people who have never been to a YAPC before feel the energy of our community. Yeah, so nobody can deny that we have a relatively old codebase, but just see this thriving community! I want people who don't really care what language they use to see that what kept me with Perl for over a decade.
So, what do we do? Well, neither JPA nor I have that kind of reach to people who aren't in the regular meetups. There there's only one thing to do: Go get somebody else with that reach to promote
Having continuous integration is incredibly helpful and setting up a Jenkins server is surprisingly easy. However, configuring Jenkins to run your Perl unit tests is a wee bit harder, although it may seem easy at first. Here are a couple of issues I ran into and some things I learned:
We all know that Perl unit tests, aided by Test::More and prove produce results in TAP format. But since Jenkins is Java and someone once dictated that Java shall only read XML and only write XML, Jenkins expects test results to conform to the JUnit XML format. Well, OK, if they want XML, let's give them XML. So you turn to your favorite search engine and ask it how to transform TAP to JUnit. You will, of course, find something. And since that something was actually written by Justin Mason of SpamAssassin fame, you stop searching at that point and download that conversion script.
Last week was a short week for me because I was doing a lot of work up at camp for the Scouts. So here's a two-week update:
TPF:
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