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I've unleashed Params::Validate::Dependencies on an unsuspecting world, and, because it was easy, have also bundled a Data::Domain subclass with it too. I hope people find it useful!

Having hacked on this stuff, I am now firmly convinced not only that all problems can be solved by introducing another layer of closures, but that all problems should be solved in this way :-)

YAPC traditionally has an opening plenary session on the first morning, and plenary sessions before the lightning talks each afternoon. However, on the second and third mornings there usually is no plenary session. 

This year we’re going to add a 10 minute plenary session at 8:40am before each day’s events. We’ll use this time to announce changes in the schedule, sell raffle tickets, announce daily contests, and generally keep you informed so that you can get the most out of that day’s activities. 

A short sleep later and it's time for the third day of talks at YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga, Latvia.

The attendees dinner yesterday was great fun - hundreds of Perl programmers at Lido in an underground cavern with a wide spread of food and beer. Today I attended:

Perl 5.16 and Beyond where Jesse Vincent explained the development of Perl and his vision for an exciting future of Perl. Andy Lester summarised a previous version of this talk. Jesse has expanded on many points since, but it boils down to declaring the semantics your code expect - and future versions of Perl will attempt you give you the semantics of older versions (making deprecations easier). And making the core smaller, and shipping two flavours of Perl (codenames: "Hotel California" - like now, and "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" - just enough to bootstrap CPAN). Making the language smaller through making it possible for CPAN modules to add/change syntax and features. Making Perl run under every platform.

The White Camel Awards recognize outstanding, non-technical achievement in Perl. This year, the White Camels recognize the efforts of three people whose hard work has made Perl and the Perl community a better place:

Leo Lapworth makes Perl websites not suck.

Daisuke Maki rocks the Japanese Perl community.

Andrew Shitov is a Perl-conference-organizing mega-monster.

Read more at Perl News.

http://www.parrot.org/news/2011/Parrot-3.7.0

Expect a new version of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler to follow shortly.

DuckDuckGo is looking for volunteers to help them convert their web service APIs to CPAN modules. They’d like their mostly Perl search engine to also have native Perl bindings, not just web services. If you’re interested in helping out, check out the wiki and contact Torsten Raudssus to get started.

So, I should really have blogged about Day 1 and 2 of the conference, which has been fantastic, but also hectic, I'll try catchup soon...

Anyway, I wanted to link the slides from my Plack basics talk.

Thanks to Miyagawa, who's 2010 talk I based it on and to Alex and Damian who's speaker training helped me refine what I'd done even further.

It was really encouraging to have so many people afterwards come up and say they were either going to start using Plack or could now see using it even more.

I hope that that talk was recorded and a video will be available, and if not I'll try do my own recording soon.

A short sleep later and it's time for the second day of talks at YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga, Latvia.

(Re)Developing in Perl 6, where Damian Conway showed us how to convert some of his Perl 5 modules into Perl 6 code. He was amusing as always and it was very impressive how some of his modules, such as Smart::Comments will involve much less code in Perl 6 (when the implementations are finished). "CPAN is an enormous Borg cube".

There was a little break for tasty pastries and coffee and I'd also like to mention that handily there are power sockets everywhere in the rooms.

Bending semantics with 5.14, where Zefram explained (while wearing a tricorn) how to add different semantics to Perl by editing the optree, and even adding new opcodes. See cv_set_call_checker).

The State of the Acmeism, where Ingy döt Net, the father of Acmeism tried to get us to join his fold: "People who create technology that is not limited to a particular language are known as Acmeists".

SSH has many features which are helpful when working regularly with files on remote servers; together they can give a vast increase in productivity over the bare use of SSH. If you regularly use SSH, it’s worth spending a little time learning about these and configuring your environment to make your life easier.

This has been presented at presented at Yapc Europe 2011 in Riga and the Floss UK Spring 2012 Conference in Edinburgh. If you’d like me to come and talk about this at your user group or workplace, please get in touch.

Multiple Connections

Often it’s useful to have multiple connections to the same server, for example to edit a file, run some file-system commands, and view a log file all in different terminal windows. Except sometimes that can seem too much hassle, so we compromise and end up repeatedly cycling through quitting and restarting a few different commands in one window.

At the MadMongers meeting last week a local entrepreneur, Adam Braus, stopped by to pitch his idea for a new email analytics system.

He's looking to hire a Perl developer to help him with this. If you're interested, please contact him.

2 of 3 talks ( / days almost) done and I roll some ideas in my head what I do next weeks. I spoke with brian d foy (brought lot of insights on the state of perl docs) and damian (thanks for helping on my slides) and with lot of ather people. I heard about twin city workshop, which I try to attend (Turin and Frankfurt too).

When I come back to germany, next $foo needs 2 more article (recension and wxperltut9) and I have to think about the 4th part of the fm-perl.tutorial as well as about my "perl 6 data structure" i will give in Pisa and frankfurt. There I will give up to 4 talks (the "hgit" again - this time with enough time, writing docs, new lang ideas).

Brian reminded me that I owe him something for the new perl review but I will not let to grow this all over my head. Kephra rewrite is after all most important and yet another article will arrive real soon (tm).

Apologies for not being perl enough in this post .. my working environment is key to me being able to get anything done so I figure it’s a grey area I’m allowed to wander into.

Something I’ve battled with for a long time is how best to manage my bash setup and aliases.

For far too long I’d been copying a .bashrc or .bash_aliases file onto each new box I’m working on, comment out a few parts, fix a few parts, …

As I started having accounts on more machines the lack of scalability soon bacame very apparent.

Luckily (for me) I’m more than happy to steal-and-adapt ideas that other people have already thought of.

bashrc.d/

The concept I’ve stolen is the /etc/*.d/ pattern. If you’ve seen one of these directories you won’t be too shocked by the following explanation of my setup.

The gist of my setup is to have a small snippet of code and a directory of useful (turn-offable) snippets.

The Small Code Snippet

I love Zurich. It's such a beautiful, well-organized, and just plain civilized city.
And so conveniently central; reachable by plane from almost anywhere else
in Europe in only 2 or 3 hours.

That's why, for the past few years, I've been running public classes in
Perl, Vim, and presentation skills in Zurich each summer.

This year is no different. From next Monday, I'm offering six classes on
basic and intermediate Perl topics, and one each on Vim and
presentation.

It's very late notice, I know, but we still have some seats available,
so if you find you have a day or two spare in the next two weeks, and
you've been looking for a chance to take one of my classes (or just want a
pretext to visit one of the loveliest cities in Europe ;-), then this
might be an excellent opportunity.

You can find the details of the classes we're offering, and the registration
links for them at: http://it.oetiker.ch/consulting/courses/2011.en.html.

Damian

DuckDuckGo is a general purpose search engine, primarily written in Perl. DDG offers way more instant answers, way less spam/clutter and real privacy. DuckDuckGo has been giving back to open source, and we’re proud to include them as our sponsor for YAPC::NA 2012. A growing portion of DDG itself is open, including user-contributed Perl goodies. 

As a side note, we’re also using DuckDuckGo as our search engine on the official YAPC::NA blog. The search results are so much more accurate now.

The first half of 2011 was a bit of a slow period for Padre.

I was distracted with getting wxFormBuilder integration to a working state, Ahmad Zawawi was distracted by his efforts to build our own Scintilla wrapper instead of waiting for Wx to upgrade, and the broken threading had people annoyed at Padre's bugginess (and me) and not wanting to contribute a whole lot.

But with the problems of background threading, rapid GUI development and having an editor widget we can actually control solved, things are starting to move forward again rapidly.

We've also seen a recent boost to volunteer numbers, with some oldies returning (prompted in many cases by Padre's birthday party easter egg) and some newbies arriving to solve specific problem areas like Mac support and packaging.

With the big problems out the way the team is able to start looking at polishing out some of the smaller problems that weren't a priority until now, and we can start to upgrade some of our crude first-generation tools into much nicer versions.

Following up on my previous post that demonstrated how to get a basic Catalyst application up-and-running on dotCloud in under ten minutes, let’s explore how to take things a step further by adding a database service.

For convenience sake, I’m just going to walk you through the Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial.

However, unlike the tutorial (or most Catalyst tutorials for that matter), we’re going to use PostgreSQL instead of SQLite — and we’re going to deploy the app into the cloud vs. just developing locally (thanks to the magic of dotCloud, which makes it so easy).

Luckily, it looks like the Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial Chapter 3 has been updated with a PostgreSQL-specific appendix, which makes things a lot easier (and means that I can spare you from my terrible SQLite-to-PosgreSQL conversion skills).

Here we go:

Memoize is a great module. It's one of those fantastic modules that, when you need it, does exactly what you need. Like when you're perfectly healthy and want to beg for money so reach for a crutch. That's how many people use Memoize.

Don't get me wrong: I've been lazy and abused this module myself. It's quick, it's easy, and as it says on the tin: "Make functions faster by trading space for time". So you know there's a trade-off: you save time, but your memory overhead increases. That's OK. Memory is cheap. No argument I might put down will dissuade you on that point.

But is it really faster?

We’re trying to pull off a fairly major overhaul of Act, the conference registration system in time for YAPC::NA 2012. So far we’ve already converted it from mod_perl 1 to Plack, and added Twitter and Facebook authentication. We have another dozen features to add, and more that we could add if we had help. 

Our git repo is available on GitHub. And you can contact our software development team leader, Rob Hoelz, to get started. 

Even if all you want to do is scratch an itch that has been bothering you about Act, we’ll be happy to help you get started working on that as well. Perhaps you have the same itches we do!

Dear Perl community!

I'm proud to say that today Sergey Gulko officially announced me as a leader of Kiev.pm group. Thank you Sergey and my appreciation to all members of Kiev.pm for approving me for this assignment and great support during debates and planning stage. Guys, you are great! Sergey I wish you a very good luck in all spheres of your personal and professional life.

Kiev.pm community exists since June 1, 2007 and until today was lead by Sergey Gulko. Our community is about 200 registered members. During past few years we had organized two Perl workshops called ‘Perl Mova’ together with Moscow.pm. This gave us an opportunity to meet Jonathan Worthington, Andrew Shitov, Alex Kapranoff and many other great people, collaborate and better know each other inside of the community.

Today was the first day of talks at YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga, Latvia. I arrived a few days ago and Riga is a beautiful town to walk around, full of restaurants and squares with outside tables to drink beer. I enjoyed walking around the main market, which is housed in ex-Zeppelin hangers.

The pre-conference meeting on Sunday was great, we slowly took over the main square here. It was nice to meet new people and see old faces.

This morning started with a quick walk through the park to get my ticket scanned and a badge (well, label) printed with my name on.

Andrew Shitov is the main organiser of this conference and he started off the conference with a welcome. A quick show of hands shows that this is the first YAPC for about half of the attendees.

Larry Wall then took us a quick tour of postmodernism of Perl 5 and Perl 6 with lots of photos of Riga.